Technology Alabama

In an all-too-familiar story in the Huntsville area, a technology — which was practiced in the garage and tested in the driveway in 2002 — has grown into a great business.

According to Jerry Gabig, president and CEO of Q-Track, Hans Schantz, who co-founded Q-Track with Bob DePierre, just “connected the dots” when they invented near-field electromagnetic ranging (NFER) technology. They incorporated the company in October 2002, and since 2004, Q-Track has been nurtured at Huntsville’s technology-focused incubator BizTech. In February, the company graduated and moved into its own space.

Schantz, a physicist, is Q-Track’s chairman and chief technology officer. He and DePierre, a former Time Domain engineer, built an initial “near field electromagnetic ranging technology” system, and recruited former Time Domain general counsel Gabig to head up the company.

In early April, Q-Track received FCC approval for the first real-time location system (RTLS) based on NFER technology, which the company considers a fundamental breakthrough in indoor wireless tracking. In late April, the system was commercially debuted at the 2009 RFID Journal Live Conference, and it was recognized as a finalist for the “Best in Show” award.

Q-Track’s system utilizes tag transmitters, locator-receivers, a location server, and Exact-Track™ core tracking software, and operates under Part 15 power levels in the AM broadcast band (-1MHz), where the long wavelengths have superior propagation in cluttered, difficult industrial settings.

The company has a number of patents in the U.S. and also has secured related patents in Europe, China and Germany. It has seen its revenue grow tenfold, from $68,000 in 2005, to $220,000 in 2006 to $680,000 in 2007. Despite the current economy, Q-Track’s prospects are bright.

Schantz discovered that a tracking tool could be created given the behavior of electric and magnetic radio waves at the first half-wavelength, following up on work done in the late 19th century by German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who first identified the phase behavior. Leaving the antenna, the waves are 90 degrees apart, but move together by the time they’re about a half-wavelength away. Schantz came to realize that by measuring the difference in the “phase” between the electric and magnetic waves, he could calculate distances.

Q-Track’s patented NFER technology can locate people and assets with an accuracy of a couple of feet or better at ranges up to 150 feet or more. The Department of Homeland Security, the Army, the National Science Foundation and DARPA have all supported Q-Track’s development of NFER technology. The Q-Track system is being used to train nuclear power utility workers to minimize radiation exposure, and reduce utility costs. It also can be used to track and locate firefighters, locate miners underground, track military personnel, improve worker safety and facilitate location in “hot” environments. It also is used for supply chain management.

Q-Track is working with the National Institutes of Health to track miners in coal mines. The company believes that eight of the coal miners in the Sago coalmine explosion on January 2, 2006 may have been saved by the Q-Track system.

“What happened is that tragically, two of them were killed outright, and another eight of them barricaded themselves as they were taught to do. They (rescuers) were going down every little corridor looking for the men, and sadly they didn’t get there in time; they were asphyxiated,” Gabig says.

He says that with Q-Track’s transmitter device, the rescuers could have honed right in to where the missing miners were. Gabig says the system has been tested in a mine run by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Pennsylvania, in which they found the system could “cut right through” a 20-foot pillar.

Gabig says that although the company got started with a technology looking for an application, which is not a very good business model, “The truth of the matter is, there are a lot of applications, and what’s even more fun is getting phone calls about once a week from people who have an application that we’ve never even thought of.”

A good example of that is the federal government, Gabig says, specifically the National Sciences Foundation, which he maintains is the hardest government agency to get money from.

“They’ve given us three grants and the biggest is for supply chain management. Their thought is that if we can make supply chain management more efficient, we can compete better as a nation. There is literally over a trillion dollars in goods, chattel, commodities in warehouses in the United States,” Gabig says.

The Q-Track system utilizes its transmitter and antenna system to track where goods are placed in the warehouse.

“Initially the idea was to put one of these little AM radios on each pallet. Fortunately, we put on our board of directors a guy named Peter Beucher,” Gabig says. Beucher, also formerly with Time Domain, was at the time heading up JIT Services and knew that in the warehouse, the radios would break off, pallets would break, and therefore the idea wasn’t practical.

Gabig says that Beucher “noodles on it and noodles on it,” and then realizes that what will work is to track the forklift. When the forklift makes contact, there is a bar code reader, or a passive RFID reader, which are married together, and therefore goods in the warehouse can be tracked and retrieved. The system is inexpensive and it works, according to Gabig, and can track within two feet of where an item is located. Beucher has a patent pending on the warehousing system.

Q-Track has received calls from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — they want to track narcotics in briefcases as they work on cases. Another call was from a fellow in the entertainment industry who is looking for a system to control how lights follow performers in concerts and in theaters. A nationally renowned professor from Kentucky is working with Homeland Security on a system to track people in high security areas, and a golf pro in Canada wants to use the system to watch several people he is training simultaneously.

Other uses might be tracking the elderly who might wander away from their home or a health facility, and tracking their daily habits for health purposes.

Gabig says they all work hard, but “it’s been a labor of love. It’s been a lot of fun to birth a new technology.”