Doggy GPS Trackers?

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My little mate is 12 now and does wander off sometimes

Started to read about GPS trackers but lots of conflicting reports, so wondering if any of you lovely folk have any personal experience ?

We're in Lanzarote if that makes any difference

Ta
 
I thought about one of these as our eldest dog is an idiot off the lead and has no recall at all, to add to the issue she loves people and other dogs and will happily go with anyone.

Then I realised I never let her off the lead unless in a secure field so it would be pointless. 🤷‍♂️
 
Tractive works for me. Working cocker with high prey instinct. Comes back but it reassures me when he goes into large dense shrubby areas. Signal rarely drops out. They often offer high discount on the hardware but not the subscription. If you know a subscriber and list them as recommender both of you get a discount/free months. I also use it abroad.

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Tractive is good. But it'll only get you to within the last 30m... or worse of there's lots of buildings. I use a Tile too. It's backup. And it's got a much louder beep.
 
Our Border Terrier often wondered off through the forest and would never come back if called, got lost and then was gone for 1-8hrs. In the end i fitted a goat bell to a removable collar that we only put on him for walks, this was enough that i could follow him and then eventually he’d slow down and be happy to join his pack again.

The batteries never ran out on the bell😉
 
I use pawfit for my two. It works well and you can remotely trigger an audible alarm for when you can't see them, but know they are nearby from the app. You can also remotely trigger a light as well for at night. Wouldn't be without mine now, although luckily rarely use it.
 
Pawfit on mine. Leaves a continuous real-time trace on a smartphone and shows every bush and tree pictorially like the detail on Google Earth. I can also establish a geo-fence of any diameter. Places him down to 2 metres but no signal from it in the unlikely event of him going into a building, although it would still show a trace of him going in and leaving. We've used it in France too.

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We use Apple Air Tags.
Give someone an airtag, get them to turn off their phone and then walk off into the woods. The only time you'll see their position update is when they are close to someone with an iPhone for a minute or so.
 
Wowsers. So many great answers so quickly
 
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Give someone an airtag, get them to turn off their phone and then walk off into the woods. The only time you'll see their position update is when they are close to someone with an iPhone for a minute or so.
So they’re useless then.
 
We use Apple Air Tags.
Give someone an airtag, get them to turn off their phone and then walk off into the woods. The only time you'll see their position update is when they are close to someone with an iPhone for a minute or so.
So they’re useless then.
Honey has found she can push through the hedge and started roaming around the village 😣. We’ve blocked up all the obvious places but it’s still happening so I bought an air tag for her collar.
Blimmin useless.
She hasn’t gone awol since it’s been attached to her but on Tuesday I tried to find the tag when my head dog Walker took her to the beach after a meeting and as Guigsy says, if there’s nobody near her with their Bluetooth turned on you just get their last known position. In her case she appeared to be outside the website designer’s house for a couple of hours, when I know she was actually on North Beach, Tenby 🙄
So we will be looking at alternatives.
 
We've had Tractive for a few years for the cats. They are indoor lads (FIV+) but in the summer they get use of our back garden. And we do take them with us in the van, but they only go outside on a harness. We've only had to use the trackers in anger once when one of them decided to investigate over the back garden wall. It was good enough that we could tell he was within a couple of the neighbours gardens. He hadn't bolted down the road.

The older Tractive trackers had a removable battery. They lasted 2-3 days on a charge. But burned through battery much quicker if you needed to put them in Live (continuous update) mode. The new version has a slightly better battery life, improved accuracy but no swappable battery, which feels like a slight backwards step. But the big advantage is it can now see WiFi. You put in the details of your home WiFi and it knows it doesn't need to turn on the GPS to get location, so it lasts weeks per charge while it's at home.

Tractive also has geofences, so you can get an alert if your pet leaves a zone. You do have to set this to be quite wide though or you'll get false alarms.

It's not a perfect system. As I mentioned, I weigh the mogs down with a Tile too as a short range backup. But I've done some testing by hiding the collar under cars or wondering around with it in my pocket. It's good enough that I've subscribed for a few years and updated to the new model.
 
Pit pat have this facility, although I only use the basic as a sort of fit bit…..tracking requires a subscription.
 
I use Vodafone Curve Smart Tracker at £2.99 per month on a month to month contract.

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