Alien Technology Announces Next Generation EMEA Gen 2 Radio Frequency Identification Reader

Alien Technology announced the expansion of its high performance enterprise category reader platform. The new ALR-9900-EMA reader is designed to the latest ETSI regulations, serving Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and densely packs numerous feature-rich offerings in half its predecessor’s footprint.

“The ALR-9900-EMA reader elevates the 866MHz-band product line to a whole new plateau.” explains Victor Vega, Alien Technology marketing director, “This new generation architecture delivers exceptional performance within a compact package. It is designed to the new ETSI EN 302-208-2 regulatory compliance standards, more commonly known as ‘the four-channel-plan’. It supports near-field and far-field coupling, and includes the powerful Alien Reader Protocol (ARP) engine for stand-alone autonomous mode of operation as well as full support of all custom commands for Alien’s industry leading Higgs-3 based inlay portfolio, including extended memory, anti-counterfeit authentication, and read cloaking.”

The ALR-9900-EMA provides backwards compatibility to today’s tried-and-true ALR-8800 reader. It supports four independent read zones with a monostatic design (single antenna per zone) and offers a highly effective Dense Reader Mode in conjunction with superb interference rejection to ensure high read rates even in noisy, congested reader environments.

Features are abundant, including: monostatic antenna refection cancellation for optimum system performance; auto-adjusting tag inventory optimization; a low duty-cycle ‘Sniff-‘n-Read’ (Seek) feature to activate the reader only when tags are detected in the RF field, helping reduce ambient noise and reader power; ARP and Automode for autonomous reader interrogation, triggered either by user-defined time parameters or by external sensors; an installation-friendly general purpose input and output interface with high capacity output drivers to control external visual or audible indicators, conveyor pushers, diverters, or access gates; masking and notification filtering to streamline network traffic; and data streaming options for ultra-fast applications.

Additional features include: RSSI (tag signal strength) and velocity filters to help alleviate stray tag reads; I/O data streaming capabilities for monitoring external sensors; a user-defined ‘state-machine’ allowing acquisition parameters and antenna sequencing optimization, including Gen 2 settings such as ‘Sessions’ and ‘Selects’; Alien Reader Custom Application for porting business and application code directly on the reader; Intelligent Tag Radar features to enhance tag singulation and to detect relative tag direction and velocity; support of both near-field and far-field antennas with a suite of well over a dozen compatible antenna offerings; and software compatibility with marquee software providers.