Simultaneous RFID Reader - M6E Nano (SEN-14066) optimal tag orientation.

Sensors NFC & RFID
1

We recently purchased a RFID Reader - M6E Nano (SEN-14066) , our plan is to use the board as is with no external antenna.

Could someone please share a link describing how to best orient the tag being read by this reader to maximize the read range / accuracy. Just for reference, the attached picture below shows equivalent information for the ThingMagic USB Pro UHF Reader.

TagOrient.png
TagOrient.png820×481 159 KB

Thank you.

2

honestly… when using the onboard antenna with 500 dBm max… I nearly have to put the RFID on top of the Nano. I consider the onboard antenna more as a test environment rather than the real world. If you plan to use it for a working application, get an external antenna, add an extra cooling package and provide external power to handle the supply.

3

Have you tried orienting the tag in different ways? From our experience that can make a significant difference. We have not received the board yet (we hope to get it tomorrow) so we have not had a chance to test the boar read capabilities with different tag orientations ourselves. We were kind of hoping to get the best tag orientation data from SparkFun to make sure we are not missing anything.

I hope you are exaggerating about having to put the tag so close to the board, we plan on using this board for a production application, we will be fine if the reader is able to read a tag consistently an accurately from around 3 inches away from the board, if this board can’t do that then this is not going to work for us (having an external antenna would be overkill for us). I though I read a review or post somewhere were they were able to read a tag around 6 inches away, I hope that is true!

Thanks.

4

I have had the board for over 2 years or so and did a lot of testing. Both with the Sparkfun library as well as the extended mercuryAPI. I have written an extended library with additional capabilities (https://github.com/paulvha/ThingMagic/t … ib_special) I never got 3 inches let alone 6 inches. The main reason is that I power from USB and in that case, you only get reliable for a longer time up to 500dBM. The reader can do up to 2700 dBm, but then you need a strong external (burst) power supply and extra cooling on the Nano. With that power you need an external antenna to get the most from it.

5

Thank you, your feedback is very helpful.

We have been using the ThingMagic USB Pro https://www.jadaktech.com/products/thin … hf-reader/ as our RFID reader with descent results (this is not to say that such device does not have its own shortcomings). The unit is powered via USB and we have no problems reading from distances up to 3 feet (36 inches). This is using “20 dbm”. I put “20 dbm” in quotes because is my understanding that such value is just a relative number meaningless for anything other than the unit power reference.

Note that this is using a cheap and crappy USB cord (not even using the one that ships with the unit) and connected from a laptop USB port (nothing special about it).

This looks to me like a design limitation and not a USB power issue or else the ThingMagic USB Pro would have the same issues.

Well, this is terrible news, we will give it a shot since we have nothing to lose but this is really disappointing. Hey who knows, may be you got a bad board :smiley:

Thanks.