Zones and antennas
A zone is a place you want to know about. An antenna is what watches it. Titan reports a tag's location as the zone of the antenna that last saw it, so the two only become useful once they're connected.
Zones
Create, rename and delete zones on the Zones screen.
Each zone has a kind, which describes what sort of place it is:
| Kind | Typical use |
|---|---|
storage | Shelving, racking, a cage, a bay. The default. |
staging | Areas where goods wait: marshalling lanes, pack benches. |
portal | A doorway or gate that things pass through. |
checkpoint | A fixed point you want to know something passed. |
other | Anything else. |
Deleting a zone unmaps any antennas pointed at it. Their reads keep arriving, but without a location, until you map them again.
Mapping antennas
On the Readers screen, choose antennas on a reader. Each of its four ports has a row:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| On | Whether the port is used. Turn off ports that have no antenna connected. |
| Zone | Which zone this antenna watches. Leave a port unmapped if you only want to know a tag was seen. |
| Role | Leave this as coverage. The other roles are for direction detection at doorways, which isn't available yet. |
| Transmit power | How hard the antenna transmits, from 10.00 to 33.00 dBm. The default is 30.00 dBm. This is your read-range control. |
| Session | The RAIN RFID inventory session, 0 to 3. The default is 2. |
| Search mode | dual-target (default), single-target, or single-target-with-tagfocus. |
| Tag population | Roughly how many tags you expect in view at once. The default is 128. |
Choose Save antenna settings. The new settings go to the reader immediately.
Getting the read range right
Too much power, and an antenna at Goods In also sees the pallets at Goods Out, so tags jump between zones. Too little, and tags in the far corner of a zone are missed.
Start at the default and turn power down until each antenna only sees its own zone. To give you a feel for it: one test reader saw 16 tags at 30 dBm, 6 at 15 dBm and 2 at 10 dBm. Your results depend on the antenna, the mounting and what's around it.
If you're not sure what session or search mode to use, leave them at the defaults.
When two zones see the same tag
If antennas in two different zones both see a tag, Titan places it in the zone with the stronger recent signal. Overlapping zones work, but placement is crisper when you tune power so they don't overlap.
Location and "present"
A tag's location is the zone it was most recently seen in. Inventory counts a tag as present in a zone if it was seen there in the last five minutes. A tag that hasn't been seen for longer still shows its last known zone on the Tag Data screen, but it's no longer counted as present.