RFID News Roundup

UPM Raflatac Debuts Hammer EPC Gen 2 Inlay for Metal
UPM Raflatac has announced a new EPC Gen 2 UHF inlay designed to work on metal. The Hammer inlay is available in three formats: wet (with a layer of adhesive), dry and paper-faced. According to the company, Hammer has a die-cut size of 80 by 25 millimeter (3.15 by 0.98 inches) and a read range of up to 4 meters (12 feet). The Hammer inlay can also be inserted into plastic hard tags that can be affixed to metal containers, roll cages and trolleys. A spacer of 6 to 9 millimeters (0.24 to 0.35 inches) is required for optimal read rates. UPM Raflatac already has one customer leveraging the new inlay: Siemens is using the inlay in its Simatic RF620T rugged tag, designed for use on metal, conductive plastic and wood.

Loc8tor Shrinks Reader, Tests Car-Finding App With Chevrolet U.K.
Loc8tor, a U.K. firm that sells an asset-tracking system to consumers who want to track possessions or monitor the whereabouts of children or pets, has shrunk the size of its handheld interrogator to roughly the size of a credit card, says the company's CEO, Anthony Richards. Like the original Loc8tor product, Loc8tor Lite uses the firm's proprietary air-interface protocol to communicate with battery-powered 2.45 MHz RFID tags. The smaller reader form factor makes the Loc8tor Lite considerably more portable, Richards says—and at $80, it's also more affordable. But unlike the bulkier Loc8tor product, Lite lacks an alert function that can be used to give the user a heads up if, say, a tag-bearing child or pet wanders too far. Next up, the company says, could be a version of Loc8tor specifically designed for finding a car in an uber-sized parking lot. Chevrolet U.K. is currently testing the concept with British consumers.

RSI ID Technologies' Antenna for Baggage Tags
San Diego-based RFID company RSI ID Technologies (RSI) has unveiled RSI Blade, an RFID antenna created specifically for use in baggage-tracking applications. The antenna is designed to work with NXP Semiconductors' Ucode Gen 2 G2XL and G2XM chips. Both NXP ICs have 240 bits for encoding an EPC, and the G2XM provides 512 bits of programmable user memory (see link NXP Boosts EPC Gen 2 Tag Memory, Performance). The RSI Blade isn't sensitive to tag orientation, the company says, making it ideal for tracking luggage and baggage. The Blade follows recent RSI ID announcements of four other new tag designs: the Corkscrew, Interval, KAT2 and Cube2.