ONE man’s frustration with wandering cattle has led to an invention that may help change the way we manage stock.
Gordon Foyster studied integrated circuitry at Stanford University in the United States and worked on an Australian technology start-up before returning to manage his parents’ Tweed heads farm, where he discovered the errant ways of cows.
“It seemed that every time I left the farm, I’d get back to discover one or two cows missing, gates open, fences down,” Mr Foyster said.
“I decided to combine my electronics background with farming and look at ways to track cattle over long distances.”
He and some of Australia’s leading wireless electronics experts, internationally recognised Wi-Fi pioneers Neil Weste and John O’Sullivan, sat down with a blank sheet of paper in 2008 and drew up the concept now trademarked as Taggle, a multi-partner enterprise.
Now under field testing at Mackay, Qld, with help from the Reef Catchments National Resource Management Group, the Taggle system reverses the principles used by GPS.
GPS calculates a location when a single receiver triangulates signals received from several satellites.
Taggle works from a single signal given off by an eartag, and the positioning is done by three ground-based stations strategically located within 10-20 kilometres of the tag.
Timing is everything in the Taggle system.
Periodically - at intervals that can range from five minutes to an hour, depending on the application - the eartag emits a faint signal.
The signal is picked up by the base stations, each of which time-stamps the signal to the nanosecond, and then transmits the information to a remote computer.
Using the minutely different time stamps, software triangulates the location of the signal to within 5-15 metres, and turns that location into a dot on a computer map.
Unlike GPS, the Taggle concept was built with cost and weight in mind.
Mr Foyster said Taggle’s development version eartags were now down to 15-20 grams, about the same weight as an insecticide eartag.
Sealed in the Taggle tag are a battery capable of at least three years of life on a low-power setting, a custom circuit chip, and a crystal for highly accurate time-keeping.
The base stations are currently being built using off-the-shelf componentry, but Mr Foyster said given enough volume, his group was confident that they could condense $1000 worth of store-bought equipment into a piece of $5 circuitry.
At the moment, the biggest cost is the antenna.
But Mr Foyster doesn’t see base station cost as a make-or-break issue for the system.
All costs will come down in proportion to the volume of sales, but in the interim, Mr Foyster believes there is opportunity for groups of producers to pitch in to put up a multi-user system.
The prototype Taggle system he has been using at Tweed Heads covers an area of 2000 hectares, and the system has been designed from the ground up to handle 30,000 tags between one base station grouping.
Base stations may in fact prove to be a non-issue if a push for National Positioning Infrastructure (NPI) is fulfilled.
Australian positioning applications, which have become integral to the farming, mining, fishing, aviation and military sectors, are highly reliant on satellite networks maintained aloft by other countries--first the United States with GPS, but now Russia (GLONAS) and Galileo (European Union).
Sectors of the industry are pushing for a nation-building NPI - a concept which takes the private base station concept familiar to farmers but instead provides a public, nationwide network of base stations for consistent two-centimetre positioning across the country.
Should that happen, Mr Foyster said, then any cost restraints on the Taggle system disappear.
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