I’d second this with my experience, the xEM reads quite easily with the several different styles of scanners at work, one of them even reads it from about 2 inches away. Apparently the more reliable performance with the xEM is because the lower frequency of the 125khz chips/antenna just makes for easier coupling as compared to the 13.56mhz chips. If you don’t want to mess around with/invest in the Proxmark, I’d recommend the white Multi-Frequency cloners, I’ve had zero problems writing to and reading from my xEM/HID Access Control Badges using it. There’s a great thread on all of the different options for programming the xEM here :