What can be worse than realize that your beloved pet is missing?
At the moment, when we can’t find our pet anywhere at home and realize he is probably lost, we start to panic and immediately begin to look for him in the neighborhood, parks or shelters. However, most often such efforts become useless. For this reason, it was created a wide range of locator collars, which tracks animals anywhere and anytime sending notifications to its owner. So, no need to be worried anymore, since your animal can be easily found with the help of GPS collar.
The Different Types of Technology
Radio collars are upgraded versions of “older” technology used to detect pet within certain range. Unfortunately, radio collars might not help to find your pet indoors, unless it’s penetrating radio frequencies, which is used by one collar we looked into.
GPS collars, is mostly used nowadays. The new advanced A-GPS is quick in tracking and finding the location. If the weather conditions are good A-GPS takes as little as a second to locate animal indoors unlike the plain GPS. Sometimes if the sky is gloomy locating the animal can take longer: up to 3 min.
WAAS-GPS, Wide Area Augmentation System GPS, has better accuracy than standard GPS. While GPS will pinpoint your dog within a 30-foot range, WAAS will handle this task within a 10-foot range. WAAS-GPS is not as fast as A-GPS in fixating position.
How Tracking Technology Works
GPS tracking system is not so easy. Some collars link GPS with radio signals, sending the information via radio signal to a dedicated receiver. Others combine GPS with communication networks, sending the information to any computer or mobile device, which has an internet access. Those relying on GPS require the pet to be in network coverage.
Moreover, most of the GPS collars do not operate outside the United States, or require subscription charges.
Important Considerations
- Battery life is a concern. Your Battery depends on how often you locate or check in. Radio collars generally have longer-lasting batteries than GPS collars.
- How will you find the way to your pet? Most radio collars helps to find the road to a missing pet by sending a strong signal at the same time showing the location on map.
- You can set boundaries for your pet. This is a useful feature for a dog that escapes from the yard — or breaks into the flower garden! Real- time notifications received, when the pet overstepped the boundaries will help to track your dog easily. However these collars can be irritating when you take your dog for a walk or drive, unless you can turn it off easily.
- Collar weight and limitations. The transmitters are quite heavy and are not water resistant.
Listed below are major locator collars on the market. Make sure to check the product’s website while making a final decision.
- Radio Collars
- Marco Polo
- Loc8tor
- Loc8tor Plus
- GPS With Radio Communication
- RoamEO
- Garmin
- GPS With Network Communication
- Loc8tor GPS Tracker
- Garmin GTU 10
- Tagg Pet Tracker
- SpotLite2.0
