They say "necessity is the mother of invention". In 2004, when we started working on the first model of our sensor, there were no reliable and affordable ‘soil moisture sensors” we could use in our research or recommend to our customers. In addition, there was no technical support available for few sensor models coming from overseas. This is why we decided to develop our own sensor. The goal of our R&D was to design an affordable sensor that could measure soil water content and soil temperature with relatively high accuracy. We took advantage of our expertise in irrigation water management, soil science and electronics, and designed a novel sensor to meet the needs of our research group and the agricultural community.

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After conducting experiments with early models of the sensor during four years of resilient work, our sensor finally became commercially available as IDRG SMS-T1 in 2008. It was capable of measuring both volumetric water content and temperature in the soil. We equipped the IDRG SMS-T1 with a dedicated reader and a graphical user interface (GUI). The reader was also designed by our group to replace pricy commercial data loggers. The handheld reader could also be conveniently configured as a data logger and work in a continuous reading mode. The GUI was developed to facilitate programming the reader/data logger and for real-time monitoring purposes.

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IDRG SMS-T1 had a large sphere of influence, which resulted in cable noise and interference with soil moisture readings. This issue was resolved by 2009 when we released the next generation of the sensor, IDRG SMS-T2. IDRG SMS-T2 was used by many researchers and growers who provided us with their valuable feedback. The lessons we learnt from our previous efforts helped us design our latest model of volumetric water content sensor, APAS T1, for continuous monitoring in soil and soilless media alike. Please read about the APAS T1 here.

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