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androidnfcrfid

Can an NFC phone act as an RFID Tag, which can be read at distances higher than 4 inches?

To be more specific, I'm trying to implement an Android application, which forces the phone to operate as an RFID tag. This tag is read by scanners placed around doors (thus the > 4 inches constraint) identifying the person and his whereabouts.

The phone will act as a smart tag, thus providing further use cases.

Thank you.

Solution

  • NFC is especially limited to the 4 inch distance. Because the Near Field Communication is seen as a "approved communication" between the two partners it is not designed to be used as a tracing device like RFID is used in stores for example.

    Thus you can use NFC as a RFID device the distance would still be limited to the 4 inches by the hardware in the phones.

    // edit

    you could instead use the new Bluetooth 4.0 Protocol. The Setup-Time between Communication Partners is as fast as NFC (<0.1s) (in contrast to Bluetooth 2.1 with almost up to 6s)