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A transponder is a medium for the identification of animals, objects or even human beings for the contact-free capture of data. The transponder may be used as a trigger mechanism for steering machines - automated feeding devices, for example, that dispense individualised rations of food on the basis of each animal's personal identification number.
It can also be used in industry as a controlling element that calls up an EDP file at a stationary reading device on a production line, where the input of production data can then take place.
We generally concern ourselves with passive transponders - that is to say, the transponder has no separate energy source of its own: it consists of a tiny silicon micro-chip, linked in a read-only or read/write capacity to the relevant antenna. These antennae can fall into two different categories.
Antenna 1 is the air coil.
Antenna 2 is the ferrite core antenna.
Their sole task is to send (or send back) a unique number that has been programmed into them in advance, or to be written over with fresh data and information (read/write transponder or advanced transponder).
Transponders require no maintenance whatsoever and have a long lifetime.
The many different designs lead to an equally varied range of possible applications.
The transponder derives the necessary energy from the high-frequency field of a reader unit.
Transponders do not constitute a fundamentally new technology, but since becoming miniaturised, as well as standardised, in a variety of fields, they have increasingly been making inroads into the areas of process control and the tracking of goods.
There are transponders in use in aspects of security - for example, for contact-free recognition on entering premises or areas that are correspondingly secured, as a medium for triggering off machine processes, or also as a form of identification, for simplifying logistical sequences and processes.
There are an extremely wide range of reasons for using transponders. Indeed, their potential usage knows virtually no limits, and rationalisation effects that were not anticipated during the planning stage often become apparent at the end of a project.
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