NEW TRANSPONDERS:Amtech, Mark IV offer new transponders, readers

Under present plans the MP-tag – which Paul Manuel VP of Mark IV is calling the T3 for “three transponders in one” – will operate with the (1) IAG E-ZPass protocols, (2) the new sandwich standard ASTMv7/IEEE-P1455 being promoted by USDOT and the closely related ASTMv6 in use in trucking and on 407-ETR, plus (3) the passive backscatter California Title 21 specs. Title 21 includes the extensive ET systems on southern California’s four tollroads and Denver’s E-470 supplied by Texas Instruments which sold its ET business to Sirit of Toronto. Amtech’s read-write backscatter systems as used in Florida, Kansas and on GA-400 in Atlanta will also be able to use the MP-tag according to Amtech. For the moment the only toll systems that will be unable to read the MP-tag, Amtech says, will be the read-only systems in Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma, the Canadian maritime provinces. The Amtech systems trademarked ‘TollTag’ are a proprietary Amtech property and Mark IV cannot unilaterally market a MP-tag that works with their readers.

Making it universal

But various arrangements could be made to allow these systems to read MP-tags. The simplest might be to swap out the single protocol readers for an existing dual protocol Amtech reader (IT2200) which reads Title 21 tags as well as the read-only TollTags. Oklahoma is already considering an upgrade from the read-only TollTags to a more capable read-write system, either an IAG Mark IV system or an Amtech Title-21 system. Maine has an orphan system but is likely to scrap that for an IAG system. The two big Texas systems in Dallas and Houston, and the maritimes have no immediate plans for any changes so their ability to handle MP-tags remains unclear.

Amtech may well cooperate in making its TollTag protocols available to Mark IV for incorporation into the MP-tag for some kind of license fee, or even simply for the goodwill of its customers. The long and short of all this seems to be that technical incompatibilities are disappearing and the principal challenges will be selling the MP-tags and making business arrangements between the various toll agencies for accepting one another’s customers. It may be necessary to set up new institutions for clearing transactions.

Mark IV says it has not talked to Amtech about these kinds of issues, as its immediate aim is to gain interoperability between the IAG E-ZPass systems and the other two open standard systems.

“Anything more will be icing on the cake,” says Paul Manuel. It expects to have prototypes of the MP-tag or T3 ready in the spring of 2001 and that extensive testing will be conducted before the end of 2001.

“This goal is to remove the technical barriers to interoperability across America. This will handle the major active synchronous and the asynchronous backscatter systems. It is what people have been saying they want – a system whereby one tag will be capable of being read anywhere in the US and Canada. At the same time it will work with the existing infrastructure so that the toll agencies won’t have to prematurely write down their investments,” said the Mark IV rep.

Debolognification

Michael Onder in charge of trucking applications at the Joint Program Office for ITS at USDOT says the decision to develop a MP-tag is very encouraging. He calls it a major breakthrough. He says the T3 provides a platform for the new sandwich standard which the USDOT is under legislative instruction to mandate. The play on ‘sandwich’ was that this was a ‘baloney’ (Bologna) standard as long as no manufacturer was going to develop the product.

So the emergence of the MP-tag will ‘debolognify’ the sandwich? (For non-Americans: the double entendre is an Italian/Anglo-saxon word play of ‘Bologna’ sausage into ‘baloney.’)

The accommodation of Title 21 and other similar backscatter systems is another major advance, Onder says. He is hoping that a border crossing New York-Quebec and another California-Baha California, Mexico can be set up as ‘early adopters’ of the MP-tag with some funding under the borders and corridors program of the FHWA. (M Onder FHWA/JPO 202 366 2639 michael.onder@fhwa.dot.gov)

Smart Card Interface

Mark IV also announced it is offering Smart Fusion (registered trademark), which will add a smart card interface (SCI) to the Fusion tag. This will operate as a normal toll tag in E-ZPass lanes and as a Hughes-style ASTMv6 tag on 407-ETR or at truck weigh station bypasses, but also allow the motorist to use a smart card to make payments on the road.

Many toll agencies are keen to upgrade service at their service centers, where restaurants typically are cash only. The Mass pike has specified in recent request for proposals for its service centers that bidders propose smartcard systems that can be integrated with tolling. Other turnpikes may be interested in developing various forms of e-commerce around their service centers, jumping from cash right to the electronic purse concept of a smartcard.

SCI-tags may also be attractive to occasional users of toll facilities for whom the cost of monthly accounts is unwarranted. MTA and the Port Authority in New York could be early potential customers. These agencies want to promote smartcards for their transit systems, and for use at parking lots and for fare-payment on buses and trains. Since many of their customers also drive and use parking at rail stations, the idea is attactive for them to be able to offer a transponder with the SCI so they could use the one payment mechanism on all modes. They would like to offer it especially to commercial customers, possibly to truck services firms that administer trucker accounts on the road. A further market for an SCI-tag is those civil libertarians concerned that a central account detracts from their privacy.

Manuel says the SCI-tag will be a challenge to sell. Many previous efforts to launch smartcards have failed, usually because of the chicken-&-egg problems of developing sufficient numbers of merchants offering to take the card while persuading customers it is worthwhile buying the card until many merchants are online. He says he has “some ideas” about how to break through, but is not keen to elaborate. Prototypes of the SCI-interfacing tag will soon be available, but Manuel’s colleague Martin Capper points out there is a lot of work to be done determining the toll authorities’ and merchants’ needs in any smartcard based system. (Contact Paul Manuel, Mark IV 905 624 3025x1202 pmanuel@fpelectronics.com)

Sticker Tags

Amtech’s windshield sticker tags are amazing. Called the Intellitag 500 or IT500 (registered trademark) series, the sticker-tag is about the size and feel of a business card. At 45mm x 85mm x 1mm (1.8x3.3x0.05 inches) it represents a ten to one hundred fold downsizing of volume of existing transponders (4,000 vs 40,000 to 400,000 cubic mm). Expected to sell for less than $10 it will drop transponder cost by between four/fifths and half from present prices ($16 to $50) of toll tags.

The secret to the downsizing is (1) the elimination of a battery plus (2) incorporation of all the memory and logic elements in a single tiny microprocessor or chip. The chip is the product of years of R&D by IBM at its TJ Watson Research Center in New York. In June 1998 rights to the little chip were bought from IBM by Amtech’s parent company Unova and assigned to its subsidary Intermech which markets barcode and other automatic identification equipment. Amtech, presently a division of Intermech, developed the antenna and integrated it for transport applications at its Technology Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The little chip can be seen and felt through the translucent plastic laminate of the sticker tag. It measures about 3mm x 3mm x 1mm (1/8 x 1/8 x 1/20 inch). The antenna is a metallic film covering about two-thirds of the central layer of the sticker. A wavy connecting wire provides the correct capacitance between the antenna and the chip. The chip contains a 1024 bit memory which can be operated to be read from an overhead gantry or pole mount at speeds of up to 128 km/hr (80mph). It can only be written to at lower speeds. That makes it less than a full read-write toll tag.

This is AVI

The sticker-tag comes with a peel-off layer of paper that leaves an adhesive surface for sticking the tag to the inside windshield of a motor vehicle. It is a true automatic vehicle identification (AVI) tag in that, unlike most other transponders it cannot be moved to another vehicle once affixed. It is designed to break up and no longer function if anyone attempts to remove it from the windshield.

The IT500 will be read at 8 bytes of data in 12ms at a maximum range of 5m (16 feet) and writes to at 25ms/byte out to 3m (10 feet). An advantage of being without a battery is that the tag has a virtually indefinite life, though its lack of a power source reduces its range, especially for read/write operations, and hence the vehicle speed at which it can be both read and written back to.

Rand Brown VP of Business Partnerships says the sticker-tag is well suited to both lane-constrained and open-road type operations. No claims are made that the sticker-tag is Title-21 compatible however. It operates in the same 902 to 928 MHz frequency and works with a new standard ANSI NCITS 256-99. Amtech announced the release of a special reader IT510 for the sticker-tag, It measures just under 400mm x 400mm x 85mm and weighs 4.3kg.

Amtech sees the major immediate market to be vehicle regulation and tax/fee purposes. An early sale is to Sichuan province in western China where they will be used to read registration data of passing vehicles. Brown says the tag could help enforcement of vehicle license payments in many countries that have difficulty collecting money from motorists.

He lists e-commerce on the fly, integration of tolling and parking, emissions monitoring and traffic management data collection as other applications. It could be a handy repository of data for a garage on the service history of the vehicle.

The sticker-tag should work well for drive-through purchases from a car. Also it could allow a policeman to gain vehicle registration data with a vehicle-mounted or even a handheld reader, once these are designed. It is unclear how or whether the sticker-tag will be sold for tolling, the major market by far in the US for transponders.

No doubt there will be ‘big brother’ cries against this technology, especially where its use is mandated. The answer may be that all the information proposed to be written into the sticker-tag is already publicly displayed and able to be read visually on the vehicle. So the technology seems to be merely making the collection of that public information more convenient. (Contact Rand Brown Amtech 19111 Dallas Parkway #300 Dallas TX 75287-3106 972 733 6600 rbrown@amtech.com www.amtech.com)

5.9GHz can’t be ruled out, completely

Progress is being made toward defining standards and specifications for a 5.9GHz communications system. A 5.9GHz DSRC (dedicated short range communications) Industry Consortium meeting May 25 with the FHWA/ITS-JPO (intelligent transp systems joint program office) had all four major north American transponder manufacturers – Amtech, Mark IV, Raytheon and Sirit – agree that they should manufacture to the same 5.9GHz standard. They have made major progress in defining that standard. It makes the European CEN-278 ‘standard’ look quite dated.

Unlike CEN the North American standard for 5.9GHz (NA5.9) will be an active synchronous transponder, all the manufacturers including Amtech have agreed. Amtech was the pioneer of passive backscatter systems and has built its business around these.

Baseline data rate for NA5.9 will be a high 2Mbps, with a long range 300m (1,000') downlink and a 90m (300') uplink to reduce infrastructure costs and allow flexibility for safety applications. It will use a narrowband approach though the design will permit migration to wideband if necessary later. It will employ the identical, much lauded, IEEE P1455 specifications from the 915MHz ‘sandwich’ standard for the applications layers (7).

Complete interoperability will be designed into the system from the start in order to avoid the farce that has developed from the loose European CEN-278 standard under which Norway-based Q-Free has one implementation and Combitech and others have different and incompatible implementations of the same supposed ‘standard.’ The Europeans have taught everyone what NOT to do in standard-making!

NA5.9, by contrast, will be designed collaboratively from the beginning by the four north American manufacturers, all committed to the principle that all readers must be able to read all tags. Raytheon’s involvement in the group is in some doubt, but its manufacturing contractor Delphi Electronics – a GM spinoff – may be taking over. Amtech, Sirit and Mark IV were all strongly represented at the 5.9GHz meeting May 25 with the FHWA/ITS-JPO.

The NA5.9 group has been meeting monthly and plans to have agreed on a full standard by the end of this year. It plans to work on validation and detailed design through 2001, vendor development through 2002 and to have product available for sale early 2003.

The group recognizes that all this will be a paper exercise without a credible plan to overcome the ‘chicken & egg dilemma’ as it calls it, whereby availability of services is needed to sell tags but a population of tags is needed to encourage investment in services. The group says flatly that end-users as individual buyers won’t solve this dilemma and that it “must be solved on the institutional/policy side.”

Here’s the show-stopper!

A powerpoint presentation (see above) produced by the consortium suggests the boldest solution: “Initiate public comment on potential rulemaking regarding the inclusion in ALL NEW VEHICLES of a standard DSRC transponder at 5.9GHz. Public comment should be specifically invited on how safety goals could be achieved absent mandatory transponders.”

ITS America’s 5.9GHz working group has apparently shied away from advocating such a mandate. The manufacturers’ consortium calls the mandate-in-new-vehicles the “Missing Advice.”

It is clear that 5.9GHz will get little early support from the toll and trucking industries. 915MHz works well enough for them. No reason for them by themselves to change. Indeed many reasons for them not to.

5.9GHz’s sole pressing rationale is new safety applications including in-vehicle signing, collision warning, vehicle control, automated collision notification, vision enhancement, lane keeping and headway maintenance, automated shoulder stops and the like.

Only safety-justified compulsion by way of mandated 5.9GHz tags seems likely to make this horse run. Other applications would then follow within a few years, but only based on a steadily growing population of transponders whose primary purpose was safety applications.

Tim McGuckin, the technology officer at IBTTA has suggested the toll industry go for a slice of frequency at the low end of the range, right at 5.85GHz (the shorthand ‘5.9GHz’ spans 5.85GHz to 5.925Ghz) in order to be as close as possible to the overseas 5.8GHz, making it a difference that could be tweaked. No harm in that.

Of course for it to be really worth doing the Europeans, South Americans, Asians and Australians would have to be talked into abandoning their limited CEN-278 systems for the more robust emerging NA5.9. But isn’t that a cow that’s already left the barn? COMMENT: We fear the baloney in the sandwich, having been banished from 915MHz, may have migrated to the higher frequency. Mandates are hard to sell in the US Congress. (Contact Dick Schnacke, Amtech 972 733 6623 dschna@amtech.com)