A hand-held portable printer includes a number of input devices mounted in
or on a printer housing including a barcode scanner, keypad,
communication interface in a receive mode and an RFID read/writer in a
read mode. The hand-held portable printer also includes a number of
output devices including a printing system, the communication interface
in a transmit mode and the RFID read/writer in a write mode for writing
to an external RFID chip. A processor selects received data from one or
more of the input devices manipulates the data and/or combines it with
other data for an output device wherein the data selected for one output
device may be different then the data selected for another output device.
The hand-held portable printer may utilize both an internal antenna and
external antenna. Applying different energy levels to the antennas may
determine whether the hand-held portable printer reads from and/or writes
to a single RFID chip or a plurality of RFID chips.