Indoor and outdoor on the same move
A tug leaves the hall, crosses the yard, and enters the next building. At the door the indoor locations stop. A separate yard board starts. The twenty minutes in between belong to nobody's payback.
The combination for a move that crosses the wall
VHF phase ranging is the indoor and outdoor combination. Fixed gateways transmit. The tracker on the vehicle, person, or asset computes its own position and keeps that stream as it passes through walls and into the yard. Plants do not insert a second technology at every dock. About 3 m (10 ft) is the planning accuracy for this job. Four antennas across roughly 40,000 m² (about 430,000 ft²) is the documented starting guide, then a pilot on the real ground. How the technology works is described in VHF for RTLS.
That combination fits a 2 km² (about 494 acre) areal and one large building that opens onto a yard, whenever the same forklift, tugger, or cage must stay visible on both sides. How the areal splits buildings is described in different buildings across two square kilometres.
What GPS is still for
GPS answers a yard that never comes indoors on the same tag: which trailer is in which lot, which vehicle is on the ring road. Under a steel roof those signals drop. Buying GPS for the yard and a separate indoor stack is a fair pair when the identities are allowed to change at the door. It is a poor pair when the payback depends on one continuous move. The handoff problem, when you do keep two streams, is described in outdoor yard GPS vs indoor hall track.
A compact hall with no outdoor move does not buy VHF because a larger site did. That hall stays on the small-hall combination described in small fleet in a small hall. Frequency licensing is a VHF cost the small hall never has to carry.
When VHF still pays back within six months
VHF pays when many assets share a few gateways across halls and yards. The cost sits on trackers and a sparse gateway set, plus the licence to transmit. The investment does not pay back within six months when a site installs it for a handful of indoor-only trucks, or when a campus installs a dense indoor grid outdoors and calls the gaps a software issue. How to judge that ROI is described in the six-month return depends on the combination.
One stream through the door is also the cleaner spatially oriented dataset. Correlation and causality analytics can ask which yard waits keep preceding a starve inside, without stitching two clocks at the dock. Live logistics uses the same locations in internal logistics optimization.
How teams decide VHF belongs on this move
1. List assets that must be visible both inside and outside on one tag - If the list is empty, stay with GPS for the yard and the indoor combination for the hall.
2. Confirm about 3 m (10 ft) is enough for those moves - Exact floor position at a mark is a different, smaller zone.
3. Include national frequency approval in the cost before you buy hardware - Survey height and gateway count on your layout. Without that approval you cannot claim ROI within six months. The checklist is in what to include when calculating RTLS ROI.
4. Keep tighter indoor technologies inside the building that needs them - VHF is the continuity layer, not a replacement for every aisle decision.
What the product can do is on the features overview. How a rollout is priced is on pricing.
Get in touch if trucks disappear at your dock door and the quote still treats indoors and outdoors as two unrelated projects.