Back in July, a team from Q-Track Corporation traveled to Bruceton, PA, just outside Pittsburgh, to conduct RF propagation and performance tests on a Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging (NFER®) Real-Time Location System (RTLS) optimized for use in a mine environment. The visit inspired this post about the history of the Bruceton […]
Technology
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Here are a few RTLS and RFID news updates… Here’s a great article in xconomy|Boston on RFID innovator, ThingMagic. ThingMagic co-founder, Matt Reynolds, was one of the first to consider using low frequency signals for indoor location. He’s now a professor at Duke University pursuing an interesting line of research […]
The proceedings of the Fifth Precision Personnel Locator (PPL) Workshop, held on the campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) August 2-3, 2010, are now available online. The agenda includes links to most of the presentations. A copy of Q-Track’s Firefighter Location and Rescue Equipment (FLARE) presentation (Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging (NFER®) […]
The Huntsville Times has a great write-up on Q-Track’s recent successful test of prototype Firefighter Location and Rescue Equipment (FLARE): HUNTSVILLE, AL — Q-Track, a wireless tracking technology company in Huntsville, unveiled its firefighter location system prototype last week in Worcester, Mass., where six firefighters died in a warehouse fire […]
You have no right to privacy in public places, and police can observe you to gather evidence without a warrant. But having a detective tail you everywhere you go is expensive. So why not automate the process by hiding a compact GPS tag to monitor your location? The system can […]
I’ve been busy in the wake of Q-Track’s FLARE testing, so it’s about time to flush my queue of collected links. Without further ado, here are some links that may not merit a full post by themselves, but are still worth attention: A must read piece on America’s Ruling Class […]
It was a busy couple of days at the 5th Annual Workshop “Precision Indoor Personnel Location and Tracking for Emergency Responders” at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. Q-Track (Facebook) unveiled our FLARE (Firefighter Location and Rescue Equipment) prototype system on Monday. Yesterday we participated in a realistic fire rescue […]
Wal-Mart made a business model out of streamlining distribution networks. Now Wal-Mart is about to implement item level RFID tagging beginning with jeans (see the article from RFID Journal). Wal-Mart has had difficulty in the past implementing RFID for inventory control. Previous efforts appear to have been hamstrung by poor […]
I’m with the Q-Track team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA today attending the 5th Annual Workshop “Precision Indoor Personnel Location and Tracking for Emergency Responders.” Q-Track will be debuting our “Firefighter Location and Rescue Equipment” concept in a presentation at 11:20am (ET). I’ll provide addditional updates as time […]
By the 1920’s direction finding was well-advanced, and DF techniques began to see everyday use in both marine and aerial navigation. [1] The Figure shows a DF array from around 1930 deployed at Croyden Aerodrome in the UK [2]. Another good example of a sophisticated and relatively simple to use […]
Here’s a great discussion on using Amateur Radio in the back country for back-up communications. The conversation has expanded into a free-wheeling examination of what people do with their licenses and the value of amateur radio for everything from emergency communications to a love of radio technology. Worth checking out… […]
Under optimal conditions during daylight hours, direction finding (DF) accuracy could be as good as one to two degrees (300m at 10km range). [[1]] At night, however, the ionosphere reflects distant signals from over the horizon. The resulting “skywave” signals have a mix of vertical and horizontal polarization components that […]
Zebra Enterprise Solutions announced last week that they will be releasing the DART Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Real-Time Locating System (RTLS) this Fall. Zebra acquired UWB pioneer MSSI in 2008.
In 1902, a reporter asked Guglielmo Marconi about the vulnerability of wireless signals to interception. Marconi reassured the journalist, “It isn’t possible without a special installation and without guessing the frequency.” [[1]] The First World War demonstrated the magnitude of Marconi’s error. The Russian Army began the war sending signals […]
Huntsville, AL based Intergraph agreed Wednesday to be purchased by Swedish measurement technology company Hexagon AB for $2.3 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intergraph, a leading geospatial and CAD software company, will remain a separate division of the company. Local coverage and comments are here.
Ettore Bellini (1876-1943) and Alessandro Tosi devised a much improved direction-finding system in 1907. [[1]] Their scheme deployed two orthogonal arrays similar to those of Stone. The key advantage of the Bellini-Tosi direction finder was a rotating transformer coupling. Rather than rotate a potentially large antenna system, the Bellini-Tosi system […]
A prolific inventor, Lee de Forest not only invented some of the first direction finding (DF) antenna systems, but also deserves the credit for having invented the first RF ranging system. Realizing that signal strength declines with distance, de Forest proposed inserting a variable resistor into the RF circuit to […]
John Stone Stone (1869-1943) patented the first effective direction finding system in 1902. [[1], [2]] Stone’s scheme involved a two element antenna with a first element (V) arranged no more than a half wavelength away from a second element (V’). The Figure below shows Stone’s invention. The two elements are […]
Communications may have been the first commercial application of wireless technology, but Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) were close behind. In the first few years of radio, a variety of aggressive inventors recognized the problem of RTLS and leaped to offer solutions. Some of their ideas illustrated the inventors’ misunderstanding of […]
From the “everything old is new again” department comes Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. Standage tells the story (familiar to students of electromagnetic history) of the development of the telegraph. Starting with the famous 1746 experiment of Jean-Antoine […]
Here’s a selection of some of the most interesting features we’ve seen on the Internet this week: Physicist Frank Tipler observes that a couple of the most prominent physicists – including Einstein and Feynman – owe their success not so much to raw intelligence or “brightness,” but rather to an […]
One of the pioneers in ultra-wideband (UWB) real-time location systems (RTLS) is Æther Wire and Location, Inc. In the Æther Wire approach, an antenna differentiates current pulses so as to yield equal and opposite impulses time-spaced according to the duration of the current impulse. This produces a time varying series […]