If the question is "where is my truck on the N3 right now", you want GPS and our fleet tracking page. This page answers the other question — "which vehicles and trailers passed my gate, when, and in which direction" — and for that, RFID at a fixed read point beats GPS on accuracy, cost per vehicle and the fact that a passive tag never needs charging.

What the gate currently costs you

Most South African yards run their gate on some combination of a guard, a logbook and trust. The failure modes are familiar: trailers that left without a record, rental units returned against the wrong contract, standing time disputes that come down to whose diary you believe, and a monthly reconciliation where the yard count and the system count disagree by enough to matter. None of this is a people problem. A busy bidirectional gate simply moves faster than manual recording can, and the record degrades exactly when traffic peaks — which is exactly when you need it.

How the automated gate works

  • Tags on the vehicles. Rugged UHF tags rated for outdoor life — on steel trailers that means on-metal tags, mechanically fixed with rivets or screws, readable at 5–8 m. Windscreen tags suit cars and light vehicles. Passive tags: no battery, no maintenance, a decade of service.
  • A read point at the gate. Typically one 4-port fixed reader driving four IP-rated outdoor antennas — two facing each direction of travel, staggered so the sequence of reads tells the system which way the vehicle moved. One lane, both directions, one reader.
  • Direction and event logic. Raw reads become business events: trailer 214 exited 14:32, tractor AB-12-CD entered 14:35. Optional sensors confirm direction and presence where reads alone are ambiguous.
  • Actuation, if you want it. The same event can drive the boom or gate for authorised tags — access control and record-keeping from one piece of infrastructure.
  • Integration into your system. Rental software, ERP, weighbridge, yard screen — the events land where your business already works. We hand over the reader SDK and API documentation with the system; the event stream is your property, and every future integration is yours to make.

Where it pays back

Rental & logistics yards

Every trailer movement tied to a contract automatically. Disputes about when a unit left or returned end, because the record is machine-made and timestamped.

Depots & DCs

Gate events reconciled against dispatch plans in real time — the vehicle that left without paperwork surfaces in minutes, not at month-end.

Plants & weighbridges

Vehicle identity fed straight to the weighbridge: no keyed-in registration numbers, no queue while the operator finds the right record.

What a project involves

A gate that works in a demo and a gate that works at month-end volumes are different engineering. The parts that decide it: RF design (reading your lane at 5–8 m without also reading the lane next door), tag selection and mounting for steel surfaces that get pressure-washed and knocked, direction logic that survives a vehicle stopping halfway, and integration that turns reads into records your staff actually use. We deliver the read point as a working whole — readers, antennas, tags, installation, configuration and integration — and prove direction accuracy at your gate with your vehicles before handover. Our reader price guide shows what the hardware layer costs and why the reader itself is the easy half of the budget.

Looking for which room a pump is in rather than which trailer left? That is asset tracking. Wondering whether the machine is healthy rather than where it is? That is condition monitoring.