Tracking Systems for Your Dogs

Dogs are always men’s best friends. How to ensure your best friends are always with you or in touch with you? Well, many dog lovers tend to get their dogs to wear collars with ID tags. Some of these collars come with useful features such as Global Positioning System (GPS), motion sensors, etc that can help the owner to seek for their dogs in case their pets go missing.

There are various tracking systems that help the owners to keep an eye on their dogs. A manufacturer of GPS equipment, Garmin, has come out with brilliant products to assist dog lovers. Garmin introduced a device, Astro, which consists of 2 parts: a hand-held GPS unit for the dog owner and another device that is mounted on the dog’s collar or harness. The dog’s collar can compute the dog’s location from GPS satellites and radio the information to the dog owner’s hand-held GPS unit. However, the system can only keep track of dogs up to five miles away. If the dogs go too far away, the radio signal might probably be lost. This system is good especially when you bring your dogs for hunting. Astro doesn’t’ use normal GPS system that is usually used to send location alerts via mobile phone. This is because the dogs sometimes might be in an area that doesn’t have coverage. The Astro, which weighs 6 ounces, cost around $599.

Besides Astro, dog lovers can also try a lightweight tag that logs the details of the dogs produced by SNIF Labs of Boston. This tag contains a computer chip which can detect a dog’s motion inside and outside the house. If the dog is out, the computer on the tag is running and collecting information on walking and trotting, and storing it in memory on the dog’s tag. When the dog returns home, the data stored on its collar are beamed by radio to a nearby receiver connected to a home computer and then to the company Web site for analysis and display. The tag is priced at $199.95.