Crossbow eKo Customer Delivers Award-Winning Wine

San Jose CA, USA – – The Porter Family Vineyards earned a place in 2008 in the September issue of Wine Spectator’s “Short List” for the Porter Family Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2005. This is a rare honor because it was the Porter Family’s inaugural vintage.

The Porter Family vineyard is currently using Crossbow Technology’s eKo Pro Series wireless crop monitoring system to measure ambient temperature and humidity at various locations.

The 20-acre vineyard is very hilly creating various microclimates that require close and constant monitoring to ensure that the proper amount of water and other inputs are provided for each area.

eKo Pro’s solar-powered wireless mesh network is ideally suited for monitoring the different blocks because it does not require line of site connection or external wires for power or network connections.

“The eKo System is easy to use,” said Porter Family Chief Technology Officer, Steven Wolfe. “And it has a number of very useful built-in applications, such as the ability to auto-calculate degree days.”

Wolfe went on to describe the tremendous value in being able to assess the trends of environmental conditions and discussed plans to add monitoring to even more locations in the future along with soil moisture monitoring sensors.

The eKo Pro Series is a highly integrated, expandable turnkey system that employs a self-powered, self-configuring mesh network of wireless sensors to deliver vital live data about crop health, vigor and growth progress via a simple internet browser.

The relatively low per node cost compared to other alternatives offers a quick, cost-effective way to deploy more sensors across varying terrain and microclimates within a vineyard to achieve broader monitoring coverage without incurring other monthly or incremental fees.

eKo also provides the flexibility to combine multiple applications into one system, including frost detection, irrigation monitoring, and disease prediction.

About Crossbow Technology

Crossbow Technology has been at the vanguard of smart sensor technology for more than a decade, and has shipped hundreds of thousands of smart sensors to more than 4,000 customers worldwide.

Today, Crossbow is a leading supplier of wireless sensor technology and inertial MEMS sensors for navigation and control.

Crossbow Technology, Inc.
4145 N. First Street
San Jose, CA 95134 | USA

Tel:+1 (408) 965-3300
Fax: +1 (408) 324-4840
E-mail: info [at] xbow.com
Web: www.xbow.com