Safety is paramount in mining environments, and a considerable amount of effort and technology go into ensuring it. One of the main requirements for enabling a high degree of safety is the ability to locate and track all operating personnel at all times. In addition, miners would also be need timely alerts and messages from a safety controller. Well-designed Wi-Fi based RTLS systems can provide all this functionality, bringing in wide coverage, and ease of deployment and configurability. The RS9110-N-11-51 Wi-Fi RTLS tag from Redpine Signals - possessing a long battery life, two-way communication capability, and extensive configurability - would be an ideal system that can be integrated into tags worn by miners, or attached or embedded into helmets and other accessories. More information on RS9110-N-11-51 is here.

TIt is common knowledge that the primary objective of the 802.11n standard is to enable high over-the-air throughputs. To do that, it has brought in a number of changes in the protocol and in the nature of the signals transmitted. The standard, still in draft form, has seen widespread deployment - and most of its promises of high throughput, while still accomodating legacy devices in the network, have been delivered. However, what is not quite obvious is that 802.11n really thrives in an ideal environment - that is, one with the absence of any legacy device in the network. This is a main reason why upcoming networks are striving to be exclusively 11n compliant. You can find a very illustrative white paper on this topic here.