Paxton Access and unbranded Hitag2 Cards, Do they Work?

[cooper549]

Hi,

 

We've got a Paxton access system around our school and its the usual issue of issuing badges and such for new staff and students. Sick to death of paying an absolute premium for the paxton branded cards, I did a little digging to find these are the hitag2 125khz cards, and promptly ordered me some for use. However after speaking to someone on the phone at an ID supplies place were I purchased them, they alluded to them needing to be pre-encoded for the Paxton System.

 

Having a quick scout around here I see a few people using paxton systems but want to know if anyone else heard of this, or does anyone buy none paxton-branded cards and can confirm if they just work.

 

It's fairly new to me the whole NFC/RFID stuff so i'm just trying to get my head round if someone is just trying blag me for a bit of extra money to basically do nothing to the cards.

 

Idiotically, I should've ordered a test card before ordering a large quantity, but nowhere seems to mention they need pre-encoding for paxton

[MatthewL]

Local EPOS place to here used to supply blank cards for Paxton systems, they were just mifare cards (not sure of exact details) but they worked and were far cheaper.

 

I have in the past picked some up on eBay but it has been hit and miss.

[Oaktech]

I'd just get a pack of 5/10 of ebay and try them, if they don't work you've got them as cards to print and hand out as 'escorted only' IDs to visitors.

[crc-ict]

Local EPOS place to here used to supply blank cards for Paxton systems, they were just mifare cards (not sure of exact details) but they worked and were far cheaper.

 

I have in the past picked some up on eBay but it has been hit and miss.

 

Beware with this - only certain Paxton readers will read mifare cards.

 

We have various readers installed in 2 or 3 batches and only the newer ones will read mifare.

 

Apparently there are two different types of reader spec?

[cjk]

We buy from jmprime .co.uk, the product is called is "Hitag2 card 125khz RFID compatible with net2 paxton access control cards". Seems cheaper than Paxton official cards. We have the normal Paxton reader, Net2 system, not the mifare readers and haven't had any problems with these cards

[localzuk]

In my experience? No. I've tried various Hitag2 cards over the years, and none of them have been recognised by the door readers.

[Katy]

We've found that half our Paxton readers like the 125KHz cards we use for the till systems and half don't see them... random though, the readers can be installed at the same time, in the same batch, and only some like them. Means we're stuck with the £4 a go cards for staff, and pupils just have to use the keypad to enter a code.

[cooper549]

My cards arrived this morning and after a bit of messing about, I still cant get them to work, so there has to be something different between the cards. I'm sending them back and I've spoken to the company and they are sending me one of their 'paxton compatible' cards that they dont list online. I was originally going to buy from JMPrime, however in trying to save a little extra money, I just ordered plain hitag2 cards from somewhere else which were around £30 cheaper, but I wish I had just gone with them knowing they list them as 'paxton compatible' The big question in my mind now is, if we know the type of cards and we know there is a difference, can I program these cards to work, or am I flogging a dead horse.

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

Just wondering if there was a conclusion to this, in terms of which unbranded cards are good candidates for Net2 compatibility? We normally buy from smartcardstore.co.uk and pay around £110 for 50 Paxton cards. Some of the unbranded cards are a quarter of this price so looking to make a saving!

 

Thanks :-)

[Achandler]

It's all about the frequency of the readers, I've just spent months dealing with door access at my place of work. Wrong frequency and the chips can't be read, there is about 4 or 5 different frequencies out there.

[IrritableTech]

It's all about the frequency of the readers, I've just spent months dealing with door access at my place of work. Wrong frequency and the chips can't be read, there is about 4 or 5 different frequencies out there.

 

There are two standards aren't there - 13.56MHz and 125kHz? Mifare Classic are 13.56MHz. FYI our Paxton gate reader reads every 13.56MHz tag I've waved at it - including my Chameleon Mini card emulator.

[Achandler]

Yeah you'd think so wouldn't you, there are 2 quite universally accepted standards as mentioned.

 

PAC/ GDX have 3 frequencies they use, 1 being really low, one in the middle and one high. There is a crossover on the higher one I think, it still works with the Mifare ones. I can't find my notes at the moment. It's one of those cases where the company doesn't follow the standards.

 

We had to buy special readers for our printers that read all frequencies, we also have offices with readers that do all frequencies and others that only manage a couple of types.

[smarties11]

Thanks all for your input. I've tried a compatible Fudan 12.56MHz card today and our Paxton door readers won't read it, but my desktop scanner will. Haven't tried the gate reader but if the doors don't read them it's a non starter anyway.

 

Have sent off for a Hitag2 125Khz card to see if they are any better

[cooper549]

Just to add another 2 pence into this, when I did my little bit of research I found that standard Hitag2 125khz cards wont work, Paxton has a special encoding to a 'hidden' part of the code that cant normally be read unless you can read the full card (including this hidden section)

 

From what i could gather people selling Net2 compatible cards have done this and are encoding the special data to the cards themselves as its not something supported by Paxton, so it something to bare in mind. There was a place called JMprime that's online and sells compatible cards quite cheap, although I haven't bought from them.

 

The other thing to bare in mind is that some Paxton Net2 readers will actually read both sets of cards (including mifare) as we have found that some of readers across our school will read other types of cards, but some wont.

 

I would like to investigate this further, but the cost of buying a reader that i can guarantee will read the 'secret' encoding from a Paxton card and be able to clone it to another is a mine field, as you can get cheap ones of amazon, but how much data they actually read is unclear, and there are some DIY/RFID Hacking tools you can buy, but for the cost of some of these, it is far easier to buy pre-encoded and let them deal with the hassle, but I would like to know if anyone would ever achieves this, as it was something that did

peak my interests a little.

 

Also the RFIDeas readers are quite handy if you want a multi-compatible USB reader to be able to plug into PC's/Copiers (although they wont ready the 'hidden' details), although I'm sure most will already know this. But we got a couple and they can be setup for multiple frequencies and such to ready mi-fare and Paxton frequencies.

[bm_999]

Hi guys got a similar issue, what happened with this in the end. did you manage to get any working fobs from amazon or ebay?

[cooper549]

In the end we couldn't get generic 125khz cards working. Apparently Paxton cards have a 'hidden' encoding to them which allows them to be read by the official desktop reader and the doors.

 

You can get a devices which will clone cards and I believe they may even clone the hidden part too, but I haven't tested this myself and the ones that cloned cards like for like are almost useless as they just copied the card as a whole a believe and would make all cards have the same 'ID' number as it where.

 

We did have a company that said they could clone cards and make them unique and cheaper than than the normal cards, but in the end they just sent us original Paxton ones for a discounted price, I think they thought I was an idiot (although they were still cheaper than the price we usually paid so win/win)

 

In the end it's was far easier to wage a bidding war for our business between companies and having the cards get cheaper and cheaper than it is to invest the time into being able to clone unique Paxton cards effectively.