Skip to content

Reference beacons

GPS doesn't work indoors. Reference beacons solve this by giving the positioning system fixed, known anchor points throughout your building, so Blecon can accurately place tracked tags even deep inside a warehouse, office, or factory floor.

A reference beacon is a small tag installed at a known location. Because its position is pre-configured, the system uses it as a spatial anchor rather than trying to locate it. When a hotspot sees the beacon, the cloud knows which area that hotspot covers and places the other tags it sees in the right network zone.

Reference beacons also make zone assignment flexible: because the zone comes from the beacon a hotspot sees — not from the hotspot's own settings — you can reorganize zones just by moving beacons, with no hotspot reconfiguration.

How reference beacons work

A hotspot or phone running the agent sees both a reference beacon (anchor) and a tag; the cloud then places that tag in the anchor's network zone

A reference beacon is a regular tag configured with:

  • A fixed position (GPS coordinates or local x/y/z).
  • A zone assignment (which network zone the tag belongs to).

A hotspot — a fixed hub or a phone running the agent — detects the reference beacon and reports the sighting to the cloud. Because the beacon's position is already known, the cloud uses it as a fixed anchor rather than trying to locate it. Any other tag that the same hotspot sees is then placed in the reference beacon's network zone.

This means you can assign network zones without configuring each hotspot individually. Place a reference beacon in a room, and any tag seen alongside it lands in that room's network zone.

Setting up a reference beacon

  1. Register a tag on your network.
  2. In Blecon Track, open the tag's detail page.
  3. Toggle reference beacon on.
  4. Select the network zone the tag belongs to.
  5. Optionally set the tag's floor and GPS coordinates (for positioning accuracy).

The zone assignment takes effect immediately. From then on, any tag seen by a hotspot that also sees this beacon is placed in the beacon's zone by the cloud.

When to use reference beacons

  • Room-level network zone assignment: Place a beacon in each room; tags a hotspot sees alongside that beacon are placed in the room's zone.
  • Flexible deployments: Move a beacon to change which zone its nearby tags land in, without reconfiguring any hotspot.
  • Sites with shared hotspot infrastructure: The same hotspots can serve multiple network zones, with beacons defining the boundaries.

Questions? Contact Blecon support — we're happy to help.