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There are more than 30 gated communities under the jurisdiction of the Dunwoody Police Department. Now, officers need to manually look for the unlocking number code for a specific gate in the access code list, and then enter it through the gate keypad to open the door. However, staff often find that this list of access codes has not been updated and the version is too old. Timothy Fecht, public information officer at Dunwoody Police, said officers would need to use special means to enter the gates to rescue victims in such cases.
The City of Dunwoody mandates that all gated community gates have this active RFID system, called SOS Silent, installed. The technology is provided by Siren Operated Sensor (SOS). Using this system, the gate automatically opens when a vehicle with a battery-operated RFID tag approaches.
Fecht said the issue of opening the door caught the attention of City Council member Terry Nall. In some cases, Nall found, officers took longer to find the correct access code. Other times, the community will change the access code for various reasons. At this point, officers need to figure out other ways to get into the community.
In March, the city council passed an ordinance requiring all gated communities to adopt a system based on RFID and voice-activated sensors. The decree states that the police department is responsible for procuring tags and readers from SOS, and each community is responsible for installing these devices. A total of 2 gated communities have installed the system so far.
McKay Lundgren, owner of SOS, said the company was founded in the 1960s to provide voice-activated sensor solutions for door openings. The founder’s father-in-law, Wayne Skeem, designed a door opening system called Horn Gate, which opened automatically when the car horn sounded. In the 1980s, Skeem’s company introduced a new door-opening system that automatically opened the door when it detected a vehicle horn sounding more than 100 decibels for 2.8 seconds.
The company has sold 30,000 of these devices, Lundgren said. However, he said police needed a quieter solution. They don’t want to arrive in the community with sirens sounding, they want to do routine patrols in the community first. Therefore, the police chose the latest SOS Silent product, which can detect vehicles not only by sound but also by RFID tags. The system uses a custom R2000 reader from 1st Choice Security along with T8000 tags.
An active 433MHz tag is attached to the rear of the vehicle’s front bumper. Every few seconds, the tag emits an ID number within 150 feet. Sometimes, police cars just pass near the gate and don’t want to enter the community, and to avoid misreading, the staff has lowered the reading distance to a few feet. The battery life of the tag is up to 5 years.
Fecht explained that at present, police have installed tags on 50 police vehicles and intend to use them on six fire trucks. The receiver uses a voice-activated sensor and an RFID reader with an omnidirectional or unidirectional antenna.
Lundgren said at least two communities have contacted SOS to purchase additional tags and provide them to residents. A resident can attach the tag to a wallet or storage box so that a reader will read the tag when he approaches the gate. However, Lundgren said the community would also need to retrofit the receiver for this to work. The community needs a receiver that can distinguish between police cars and resident vehicles: Resident tags can only open their own neighborhood, while police cars can open all neighborhoods within the city limits.
Each receiver is priced at $600 each, and installation costs $500. Receivers are priced based on order size, Lundgren said, and typically cost less than $1,000 per unit and $25 per tag.
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