Abstract: A carrier pigeon receives a ring with an electronic transponder which for competition timekeeping can be interrogated when the pigeon arrives at the pigeon loft, by means of a high-frequency field, in order to be able to store the arrival time, associated with that individual pigeon, and later evaluate it for lists of winners. In addition the pigeon carries a conventional ring (which therefore cannot be in any case automatically read off), with the registration number of its organization. There is no relationship between those two sets of data (electronic identity number and conventional organization number), which can confuse and irritate the breeder when associating his pigeons. Therefore, a table is additionally fed into the operating device for contact-less high-frequency interrogation of the identity carrier, in which table the identity numbers and the organization numbers of the pigeons are associated with each other.

Abstract: An apparatus for the acquisition of items of identity information (19/31), in particular for the measurement of sport time and/or for monitoring and possibly invoicing in the course of access checks or operations involving transportation of material, is to be designed to be as manipulation-resistant as possible. For that purpose a distinction is made between local acquisition regions, in each of which is installed at least one reading device (22), and at least one central processing region which is operated separately therefrom and under special control and at which an evaluation device (43) is operated. The transfer of data between the acquisition region and the processing region is effected so-to-speak `physically` by means of an operating device (30) which can only be connected either to the reading device (22) or to the evaluation device (43).