GPS for the Dog: Our Way of Staying Connected

Our Mrok spends most of his time off leash. He is young, he does not wander far, but it has happened that he ran off, for example after a deer.

How do you locate a dog that has vanished from sight? How do you find a dog that has had an accident and cannot come back on its own?

A good dog tracking system works in all conditions - even in salt water.

Two groups of devices

There are two main groups of devices on the market that help you locate a dog.

The first relies on the mobile phone network. Before you buy one, ask the seller whether the whole system works when you do not have your phone with you.

The second works also where the phone signal is very weak or absent. Here ask the same question, because the answer tells you whether you are choosing the right system.

Little Mrok, still with his first GSM-based tracking system.

When a phone is enough

If you live in a city, you never go far from home, you do not plan trips with the dog, and the dog only goes out in the city (where the phone signal never drops), then the first group of devices is for you. Buy the cheapest one that runs for a long time. Ask the seller how long the device on the dog's collar lasts on a single charge, because that is the real time in which you have to find the dog if it gets lost. After that the device stops working.

There are more of these devices on the market than any other kind. We use them ourselves for our cats. We fasten a small device to the cat's harness and use it when we travel together, for example to the mountains, where the cats do not go far from the cabin we are staying in.

Tru, one of our cats, with his GSM-based tracking device.

The biggest advantage is that these devices work with the phone, which most of us never part with, trusting that the system will handle any search.

Ask too whether the device works abroad. Phone-based locators have their own SIM card and often do not include roaming, so outside your country they may not work at all, even where the signal is full.

A 10 km range gives plenty of peace of mind when watching Mrok run freely.

When you cannot phone the dog

Imagine you take the dog to friends outside the city. The dog spots a hare and disappears, chasing it hard. You start up your phone, sure that you will see where he is in a moment. Instead, you cannot connect.

What the dog wears on the collar is a small phone with a tiny antenna. It works exactly like your phone: it needs a network signal. You can be standing somewhere with full coverage, but the dog has just run into a dense forest or into a valley where there is no signal. Then it is exactly like a phone call when the person on the other end starts breaking up and disappears. Except that someone is your dog, and you do not know where he ran.

On the right side of Mrok's head you can see the flexible, very tough antenna. It is what lets Mrok's collar communicate with the device I hold in my hand.

If you live in a city, this is exactly the situation your system should be ready for. Systems based on the phone network work best where the signal is strongest. As the signal weakens, the system becomes less effective. And if the dog has an accident, it usually happens away from home, in a place you do not get to choose. Then the system either works or it does not, and that is not the moment to find out.

We know well that sometimes a moment of inattention is enough, or something that frightens the dog that one time, and the dog is gone. That is when the system has to help.

The Bieszczady Mountains, difficult terrain for any form of communication. Here our system worked in the forest, between the mountains, over a distance of more than 4 kilometres.

“My dog always comes when called”

Before I describe the second group, one thing you sometimes hear from dog obedience specialists: “My dog always responds to the recall, so I do not need a system like that.”

In our view, a hundred percent recall is the holy grail of every owner. There are dogs that recall perfectly and ones that, at the sight of a colourful butterfly in a meadow, forget the whole world, owner included. But even the best recall stops being a hundred percent the moment the dog's surroundings change in a way we have not noticed yet and he already has.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/25bef7_bc6257bc3d594aa98ba3128ce945afad/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The blue arrow shows that Mrok is 140 metres to the left. I switch the view to the map. Now the black arrow symbol is my position, the dog symbol is Mrok's current position. The blue lines are the way, the track, Mrok moves across the terrain.

Back to earth. A location system has to work also when an accident happens. If the dog is hurt, because a car hit him or he ran into an illegal trap for wild animals in the forest, you have no chance of recalling him. Either you know where he is, or you can spend a very long time looking for your friend.

It is similar when the dog is stolen. Thieves usually throw such locators away, but in the first moment they can point in the direction someone took your dog.

Sunset over the lake. If there is water somewhere, that is where Mrok is :) A dog tracking system should also work when partly submerged.

The second group: independent of the phone

The cats have their own locators, so Mrok got his first GSM system as a puppy too. Cats move calmly, close to home, and there was never any trouble with them. For Mrok, one bird and dense bushes were enough: he bolted, and I did not know where he was. After the second time like that it was clear that this system had to change.

The second system is independent of the phone network. It works in any terrain, mainly where our phone has no coverage. This is the one we use ourselves, because we travel with Mrok.

By travel we mean every situation in which Mrok can move away: during a pee break at a petrol station, in the mountains, at sea during a kayak capsize, in the forest when he runs off to check some scent.

In the forest, the range drops to about 2–3 km, but in the mountains with varied terrain, we’ve never lost signal beyond 4 km.

The dog connects with the owner through a long range walkie-talkie, that is a radio that needs no phone to work. The dog's position goes from the collar to a device the handler holds. On it you see the direction the dog is moving, his speed, his position on the map, and more. One device can track several dogs at once.

This is the collar Mrok always wears. On the left, the battery, the radio, and the lighting system, then Mrok's ID tag, the small orange block is the highly sensitive GPS antenna, then the d-ring we added for clipping on the leash. The long, flexible "wire" with the orange tip is the radio antenna.

Garmin gives a range of up to 10 km in open terrain. It is a radio, so in practice everything depends on the lay of the land and obstacles. In a new place we always like to run our own test: we do not send Mrok off into the distance, we take the transmitter into the car and check every kilometre whether we still have a connection. That way we know what we can count on right here.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/25bef7_c518dcc8e6c9408c8ffe71c7755f628f/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Here, the system in real use in the mountains and a dense forest buried in snow. The blue arrow shows the direction where Mrok is. At the bottom left, the small dog symbol and his speed in m/s. On the right, the distance to Mrok. The data refreshes every 10 seconds, so if the dog moves very fast he may turn up beside us before the distance on the display changes.

There are several such systems. We use Garmin, because it is the most trustworthy navigation solution we have known for many decades. Other, similar systems work on comparable principles.

Nice features in the Garmin

We always practise the recall signal with Mrok. On the device we always carry, we press the button that triggers a sound on Mrok's collar, similar to the whistle dog trainers often use . After the first tone Mrok already turns sharply towards us. The training principle is the same as with any recall: someone calls the agreed emergency word, the dog's name, gives a whistle, and we press the button. Mrok always hears the signal. And when the dog lies hurt somewhere and cannot come, this sound lets you locate him by ear where you cannot see him.

The Baltic, the Atlantic, salt water. That is another challenge for the system's build. Ours has been submerged many times and works completely correctly. Mrok's position can of course be tracked also when he is swimming.

The second thing is the light you can switch on remotely on Mrok's collar. Different colours, steady or flashing, can be set for several dogs so you can tell them apart easily during evening walks. The light also signals the dog's presence to drivers, and after dark or in a dense forest it is sometimes the only way to find a hurt dog at all.

Mrok in a shoe shop. A huge shopping centre, many floors, a lot of concrete. Our system relies on a connection with satellites. It does not need phone coverage, but... in a shopping centre like this it does not work.

Almost every Garmin device that works with a dog collar is also a full navigator. During a walk we can mark points, return to them later, move through fog and after dark. We have checked this many times in the jungle in Portugal, in the mountains, and in every new place, where we do not worry about whether we will find our way back to the car.

Some Garmin devices (the ones with the letter “i” in the name) also have inReach satellite connectivity. It lets you send a message or an SOS signal from where there is no mobile coverage at all, through satellites, not through the phone network. So the same device we use to locate Mrok is also a call for help when the dog, or one of us, needs rescue. How to evacuate a dog from difficult terrain we describe in a separate article.

Paddling down a river with many fallen trees. Both we and Mrok get in and out of the kayak many times. That is a good test of how durable the dog tracking system is.

Where we tested the system

In the Austrian Alps, in Poland (forests, mountains, cities), in France, in Spain, on the beaches and in the mountains of Portugal, in Germany, in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia. And every day, on all of Mrok's walks.

A winter sunset in the Austrian Alps. Despite the low temperature, the system runs without trouble for many hours.

Low temperatures in the Alps are no problem at all. We can switch the light on remotely, which makes Mrok easier to spot during night hikes.

Our set

Garmin offers many systems for training and locating dogs. We chose a collar for location only, without the so called “trainer” with an electric stimulus. As the device we carry with us, we chose one with a large screen and many extra functions that we use ourselves on trips (we will write about that in a separate article).

The number of compatible devices is large, so you can pick the combination that fits best.

Our set is:

•        collar: Garmin Alpha T 20 K

•        navigator: Garmin Alpha 300i

This is what the receiver looks like - besides tracking up to 20 dogs at once, it’s also an independent, high-quality GPS we use on our trips far from civilization.

A collar instead of a collar with a harness

At first we put the GPS collar on Mrok as an extra, on top of the harness. We quickly realised the harness was unnecessary. Adding a small d-ring turns the extremely tough GPS collar into the main collar.

Water is the exception. When we move by kayak or boat, Mrok wears a life jacket on top of the collar.

Adding this small d-ring was a quick and exceptionally effective way to turn a collar for carrying the tracking system into a fully fledged everyday collar. The material it is made of is exceptionally tough.

When neither of these systems will work

When the dog is not wearing it. You might think such a collar is something you put on for a trip. Experienced owners know that statistically a dog has a much greater chance of getting lost where it goes out most often: close to home, on an ordinary walk. There, where it seems to us that a collar with a locator is unnecessary.

In our view it does not matter much what the system you deliberately choose is called. What matters is that it becomes a normal, everyday part of every outing with the dog, because only then does it have a chance to work.

Rolling around on the grass, but also in mud and other fragrant surprises. The tracking system is not afraid of that, but once you are home it is worth washing it thoroughly, because the fragrant remains (not always like Chanel No. 5) work their way in between the parts of the collar.

Read this text and have doubts about your system?

If so, it has done its job. What is left is to clear them up by checking for yourself whether the system you have actually works.

Ask a friend to help you with a test: have them take your dog's collar and move slowly into the forest, holding the switched-on collar in a lowered hand, low above the ground, as if it were on the dog's neck, into the bushes, the places where the dog could potentially disappear from your sight. You stay outside and watch the readings, on the app on your phone or on your chosen GPS navigator that works without phone support.

From the perspective of several years of use, the collar with Garmin navigation means a lot of peace of mind for us, both on everyday walks and on far away travels. So far we have not found a better solution.

Be objective. If the signal drops, check under what conditions it happened: was it the bushes, the forest, or maybe the lay of the land. Do not overrate how your system performs. None of them is perfect, which is why you need to know its limits well. Once you know them, you can tell where it does not work (this mainly concerns systems based on the mobile phone network), and that can shape your choice of places to walk the dog.

At the end it is worth checking whether the chosen system can help in the search for a lost dog. That is, whether you can use your system to search for a friend's lost dog. If so, that is an extra useful function, supporting other dogs in difficult situations you are ready for. Which solution do you use? Do you have experience with a system like the one Mrok uses? Write what you think about it.