ODIN Benchmark Study Identifies Top Handheld Performers

The testing compared circularly polarized antennas, designed to pick up reads from a variety of tag positions, with linearly polarized antennas, intended for high read rates for a specific orientation. A circularly polarized antenna will provide higher read rates for randomly orientated tags, but typically at lower read distances than a linearly polarized antenna. Motorola's new RFID handheld reader, the MC3090-Z, which scored high in the testing, employs a combination linear and circularly polarized antenna, known as the RFID MAX antenna.

All readers run either the Windows CE.NET or Windows Mobile operating system, and some support both. Because there was not a single common operating system among all readers, however, the researchers had to make several software adjustments to the data. Obtaining and evaluating the reader functionality based on the data was one of the researchers' biggest challenges, Sweeney says, noting, "There was no single operating system" for the readers, "so we had to normalize the data to make it consistent." That required putting ODIN's own software application on the reader, and using that to capture reader data, or utilizing the existing reader software and attempting to normalize it to correspond with the data from the other readers after it has been received from the reader.

"One of the biggest surprises that came from this benchmark," Sweeney states, "was the variability in antenna design, and how much that can drive performance of the reader." Some of the highest-performing readers, he notes, had a large antenna surface area that proved to boost distance reading.

The complete benchmark report can be purchased for $750 at ODIN's Web site.