BRUNO ON RADIO FREQUENCY ID (RFID)
After marking my territory on a number of outfits I
landed with this group called Optimal Livestock
Services. Come to find out they have done some
amazing work on how RFID can be used in the
sheep industry. To do some proper canine
tracking I went on the Canine Boogle net work to
find out the history on this technology. It’s
generally said that the roots of
radio frequency
identification technology can be traced back to
World War II. The Germans, Japanese, Americans
and British were all using this thing called radar—
which had been discovered in 1935 by Scottish
physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt—to
warn of approaching planes while they were still
miles away. The problem was there was no way to
identify which planes belonged to the enemy and
which were a country’s own pilots returning from
a mission. The Germans discovered that if pilots
rolled their planes as they returned to base, it
would change the radio signal reflected back. This
crude method alerted the radar crew on the
ground that these were German planes and not
allied aircraft (this is essentially the first passive
RFID system).
It seems there was this place at Los Alamos, New
Mexico that had a lot of scientists that developed
the atomic bomb. Atomic bombs lost favor
because they were dirty. Personally I didn’t like
the smell of them either. The Agriculture
Department saw a need to keep these scientists
employed so they requested them to develop a
passive RFID tag to track cows. They figured that
they could use this technology to keep track of
medicines and withdrawal times so bad drugs
would not get into milk used for human
consumption. Los Alamos came up with a passive
RFID system that used ultra-high-frequency (UHF)
radio waves. These UHF radio waves had some
problem they called backscatter. To a dog this is a
bit confusing. Some companies went to the
drawing board and developed a low-frequency
system (125 kHz) system. This evidently was
better and they put this in a tiny glass cylinder so
it could be put under the skin or in a tag.
Prepared by Cleon V. Kimberling, DVM
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