ThingMagic Mercury xPRESS Platform v1.7 User Manual
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A D I V I S I O N O F T R I M B L E
Regulatory and Safety Compliance
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label of the product (which IC requires for their ID as well). The Industry Canada product
ID’s for the xPRESS modules are:
Micro and Micro-LTE: 5407A-MERCURY6EM
M6e: 5407-QV5MERCURY6E
Bluetooth Module: 6514A-RN42
WiFi Module: 6514A-RN171
EU has their own set of regulatory requirements for RFID equipment, created by ETSI.
ETSI requirements have been adopted by many countries and several others have
adopted their RF requirements with a slightly different band of operation. The EU band is
roughly in the range of 865 to 868 MHz, which is well below the FCC range.
Unlike FCC, EU requires self-certification rather than submitting a reader (or module) for
approval to a certified test house. The self-certification consists of a test report (which is
usually from a 3rd-party test facility) and a letter certifying compliance, signed by an
officer of the company. ThingMagic customers can use the ThingMagic module test
results as the test results they supply to their customers, but they must supply their own
certificate of compliance sighed by one of their officers. As ETSI augments and amends
their requirements, they continue to allow use of equipment that conforms to older
requirements for a period of time. The standard that covers UHF RFID is document
number “EN 302 208” and the current version is 1.4.1.
The optional modules are certified to the following ETSI standards;
Bluetooth Module: EN 300 328: v1.8.1
WiFi Module: EN 300 328: v1.8.1
Although both the M6e and Micro support both the FCC and EU regions in a single SKU,
this does not necessarily mean that a single product can be created which can be
operated in both these (and other) regions. Two factors limit the ability to create a single
world-wide model:
1. Conflicting labeling requirements among various regions which cannot be resolved
by including all information on a single label.
2. FCC’s insistence on a “BIOS-level” lock-out for altering the RF characteristics of a
transmitter in a way that would violate FCC requirements. This means that the EU
region of operation, for example, cannot be selected via a simple configuration menu
option along with the other RF characteristics, even if the hardware supports it.
Safety certification to protect people installing, using, and maintaining the product is
governed by Underwriters Laboratory (UL) in the US and CE in Europe. When
ThingMagic certifies a reader for safety, we have the reader tested against the “CB”
requirements, which is a super-set of other requirements and is accepted by most
countries as proof of conformance (although they often require that certification be