FEIG ELECTRONIC set out in August 2026 how UHF RFID can be used to confirm that every hose, breathing set and hydraulic rescue tool is back on the right fire appliance after an incident, and to record when each item was last cleaned, tested or serviced. FEIG ELECTRONIC is a German electronics manufacturer, founded in 1948 and based in Weilburg in Hesse, which builds RFID readers for logistics, rail, healthcare, libraries and access control alongside its cVEND unattended payment terminals.
The problem it describes will be familiar to any fire and rescue service. After a large incident, kit comes off the vehicle, gets used, gets contaminated, and has to be cleaned, tested and put back. A vehicle is only available for the next call if it is fully stocked, so the completeness check matters as much as the maintenance does. Requirements for documentation and traceability keep growing at the same time, and much of the checking is still done by hand against a printed inventory.
Giving each item a digital identity
The approach FEIG sets out is asset tracking of the plainest kind: fit each piece of equipment with a rugged, battery-free UHF RFID transponder. That gives the object a unique identifier which stays with it for its whole working life, so anything done to it, a pressure test on a hose, a service on a cutter, a check on a breathing set, can be logged against that identifier rather than against a handwritten asset number on a card.
For the completeness check, FEIG points to fixed RFID readers such as its LRU4000X paired with a LOCFIELD antenna installed in the vehicle itself. The reader takes an inventory of what is in the lockers and compares it against the intended load, so a missing item can be flagged to the crew there and then rather than discovered at the next shout. For workshop and maintenance work, the handheld ID ECCO+ presents itself to a phone or tablet as a Bluetooth keyboard, which means an existing maintenance form or app can accept tag reads without being rewritten around RFID.
Why UHF suits a fire appliance locker
UHF RFID, meaning EPC Gen2 and ISO 18000-63 tags read in the 865 to 868 MHz band in Europe, fits this job for reasons that go beyond convenience. It needs no line of sight, so a whole compartment of stacked hose and cased equipment can be read in a single pass with nothing unpacked or presented to a scanner. The tags are passive, drawing their power from the reader, so there is no battery to go flat in a locker over several years. And a hardened tag can be specified to survive the heat, water, foam and decontamination washing that firefighting kit goes through.
The awkward part of UHF is that it reads too well. A conventional panel antenna on an appliance parked in a bay would cheerfully read the tags on the vehicle next to it, and return a completeness check that passes because the missing hose is sitting on somebody else’s truck. That is the point of LOCFIELD-type antennas: they are near-field UHF antennas built as a radiating cable, so the read zone follows the cable run through the locker and drops away sharply beyond it. The zone is defined by where the cable is routed rather than by turning the power down and hoping for the best.
FEIG names no customer, no fire service and no deployment figure in the announcement, and it is candid that this is not new ground: several suppliers already sell equipment management systems of this sort into the fire and rescue sector. The argument being made is that the technology has settled down enough to be treated as ordinary kit, and that the return on it is measured in time crews do not spend counting items and writing the count down.
Read more at https://www.feig.de/en/news-en/rfid-technology-helps-fire-departments/
