Wireless Scales

Sorting the eight products into three groups makes the rest of this page straightforward.

You need a whole scale, in a fixed place. Then you want one of the three complete RF floor scales: Premium RF 4 × 4, Premium RF 5 × 5 or the Guardian 4 × 5 with the TI-500 RF. Platform, load cells, junction box, RF link and indicator, calibrated together and ready on arrival.

You need a whole scale, but not in a fixed place. Then the answer is the WB5040 weigh beams. They are not a floor scale with the cable removed; they are a system with no deck at all, two beams that slide under the load at 3.7 in and pack up afterwards. They appear in this category because the beam-to-indicator link is Bluetooth.

You already own a wired scale. Then you want an RF kit, and you should know exactly what it is: an indicator plus a radio module, with no platform and no load cells. It converts a scale you already have from wired to cable-free. It is not, on its own, a scale.

One more honest note before you go further: wireless costs money. The wired Guardian Premium 4 × 4 is $1,625 against $2,125 for the RF version. That $500 buys the removal of one cable. Sometimes that is obviously worth it, and the next question is about when.

Worth testing honestly, because the wired versions of these platforms cost several hundred dollars less and every complete scale here also ships with a cable for wired operation anyway.

The cable is genuinely the problem when the run has to cross a traffic lane. A homerun cable across an aisle gets driven over, and it will eventually fail: that is a repair, plus the downtime, plus the recalibration, repeating for as long as the layout stays that way. Conduit or a floor channel solves it too, but that is contractor work and it fixes the indicator's position permanently.

It is also the problem when the readout has to be somewhere the platform is not: in an office overlooking the floor, at a supervisor's desk, or carried by the operator. A Class I radio link gives roughly 100 m of range, so the indicator can go where the person is rather than where the cable reaches.

And it is the problem when the platform has to move. Weighing at a different bay next month means recabling a wired scale; a wireless one means carrying the platform and the indicator.

What the radio link does not change: accuracy, capacity, certification, and the fact that the four load cells still run cables to the junction box inside the platform. Wireless replaces exactly one cable, the one from the platform to the readout. If that cable was never in danger, buy the wired scale and spend the difference elsewhere.

The pricing here looks wrong at first glance and is worth explaining rather than glossing over. The Premium RF 4 × 4 is $2,125, the Premium RF 5 × 5 is $2,325, and the Guardian 4 × 5 starts at $2,480. The dearest of the three is the older design with the less capable readout.

The reason is the deck size. Premium comes in 4 × 4 and 5 × 5. The 4 × 5 footprint, 48 × 60 in, only exists in the original Guardian line, and it is a genuinely useful shape: deeper than a 4 × 4 for a long load, narrower than a 5 × 5 where aisle width is tight. If you need that footprint, this is the only way to get it wireless, and the price reflects a lower-volume product rather than a better one.

If you do not need it, the Premium RF is the better scale and the cheaper one. It brings the IP69K G-700K instead of the IP54-class TI-500 RF, so it survives high-pressure washdown; it adds piece counting, accumulation, peak hold and checkweighing; the undercarriage is ribbed A36 structural steel with self-articulating ball-and-cup feet adjustable from the top; and the junction box is an IP67 JB-FI-4 with individual corner trim potentiometers.

There is one more pricing quirk in the same direction. On the Premium RF, 10,000 lb costs the same as 5,000 lb: capacity is a menu choice, not an upgrade. On the Guardian 4 × 5 the 10,000 lb option adds $50. Both capacities are separately NTEP certified either way, so on the Premium there is no reason not to take the higher rating unless you specifically want the finer resolution a lower capacity gives.

All three kits do the same job and contain the same two pieces: a TI-500 RF indicator and a single-channel RF weighing module. Two attributes separate them.

The indicator housing. Alpha XR at $1,085 has an aluminum enclosure. Delta XR and Foxtrot XR at $1,295 have stainless steel, for washdown or corrosive areas. Same logic as everywhere else in the catalog: the readout is what the environment destroys first.

The antenna. This is the only difference between Delta and Foxtrot, and they cost the same, so it is purely technical. Delta's module has an internal antenna; Foxtrot's has an external one. Choose external whenever the module has to be mounted inside a metal enclosure, because a metal box is a shield and an internal antenna inside it will lose most of its range. Also choose it when the path to the indicator is obstructed or near the limit. If the module sits in the open, internal is neater and there is nothing to snag.

The word single-channel matters when you are planning a conversion. The module takes one load cell signal, so a floor scale with four load cells converts fine because its junction box has already summed the four corners into a single output. What a single-channel module cannot do is take four load cells directly. If the scale you are converting has no summing box, that is the part to add first.

These kits are aimed at scale fabricators and at anyone with a serviceable platform and a dying or badly placed readout. If the readout is the only problem and the cable is fine, a plain digital indicator is cheaper.