Browse - Home
18.7 Secure Series
RFID III and DASH7
The US Department of Defense’s RFID III Contract was awarded in December to four Contractor and Active RFID Supplier Teams including Hi-G-Tek and our Prime Contractor Unisys Corp. The 3 plus 2 optional year Indefinite Demand/ Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract has a total cap of approximately $500M over the 5 years.
The RFID III contract is a single point vehicle to provide Active RFID products and solutions for the US DoD, NATO, and Coalition Partners.
Currently, RFID tags are attached to approximately 125,000 shipments of military supplies each week. As shipments pass through field locations, fixed and handheld readers send and receive the associated container’s location and manifest data to and from the tags. This data is made available to the warfighter and others supply chain commands via central monitoring software for greater visibility into the location and status of shipments.
With RFID III, the Department of Defense is moving from proprietary technology to the international standard ISO 18000-7 for a more open RFID infrastructure and to drive down prices with multiple vendor competition. The ISO 18000-7 standard, as applied to the RFID III contract award, ensures total interoperability between the 4 vendors products.
The ISO 18000-7 standard defines the over air interface protocol “language” and well as the radio frequency at 433.92MHz. This frequency features a low power consumption that allows the incorporation of various sensor attributes including temperature, humidity, shock, light, and location. In addition, the 18000-7 standard establishes an automatic identification of assets at distances exceeding 100 meters.
Hi-G-Tek has developed an entire product suite of hardware and software to service both the RFID III contract as well as global commercial markets. We have proactively taken a leadership position in the ISO 18000-7 active RFID community by becoming a founding member in the DASH7 Alliance. The Dash-7 Alliance is an independent industry action group whose purpose is to promote the use of ISO 18000-7 Active RFID technology and influence the future iterations of the international standard from an end user perspective. Founding members come from the manufacturing, system integration, and end user communities including the US Department of Defense, the US Department of Energy, Dow Chemical, and Unisys Corp.
