Review on Tractive LTE GPS Dog Tracker Cats by Shane Minter

We bought this for our active cat. My goal was to track where he goes and how many times he crosses a busy street so we can decide whether to release him in the future. I like this tracker so much that we might consider making it permanent, which wasn't part of the original plan. Things that work well: - You can set up a very accurate digital fence. I live on a regular sized lot and it was important to me to know exactly when he crossed the street on our block (I don't care where he goes on our lot). I was surprised that I was able to draw the fence lines so accurately onto the sidewalk rather than the edge of our yard etc. And the shape doesn't have to be square - you can specify any shape along any street/property line you want. - You can view a heatmap of all the places he's been in the last 24 hours and see where he's spent more/less time by color-coding. This is funny. I use this to determine how often it hits more/less safe areas. See image. You will receive notifications when he enters/exits the digital fence. Real-time tracking (you can see where it's going in real-time) works well unless it's in a wooded area. This helps me when I'm trying to bring him in and I need to know where to look for him and what direction he's moving at the moment. The physical tracker has a secure connection to his collar, I'm not worried about that. come from. Charging is easy and I believe the charge will last at least a couple of days. Note that I let my cat in and out (she doesn't come and go on her own). So it's easy to check the battery life before I share it. If your cat has a door to come and go by, I can see that controlling battery life is a bit of a hassle. However, the app sends a notification when the battery is low, so overall I think the battery life and charging work well here - I like the design and ease of use of the app on my phone. It's not bulky and gives me the information I want. Things that work worse: - Sometimes its position doesn't update for 30-40 minutes or more. So if I'm checking where it is and its last position was updated 40 minutes ago, I need to turn on live tracking to get a more recent reading. I also don't know if the app would have known if it had crossed our digital barrier at that point. So I'm worried that I'll miss the moment when he crosses the street and might call him back. However, when I look at the historical heatmap, the app doesn't seem to have any gaps in its position. The physical tracker is too big for a cat. Eventually I got used to just clipping it to his collar (not the harness), but at first I was worried it would be too heavy for his neck. That doesn't seem to bother him now. My cat is a normal size, around 12 pounds. see drawing. The activity/exercise tracking features appear unnecessary to the animal. I only use digital fence, realtime tracking and historical heatmap. Although personal preference - once I lost the signal for about 45 minutes when he went into the woods. The app didn't tell me that the signal was lost, it just wasn't updating as usual, so it took me an hour with no location update before I realized it was offline. The live tracking wasn't working and I was panicking that something had happened to him/tracker that hadn't happened before. Typical cat fashion, after walking around the block and calling him, he popped back up on the app near the house after selectively ignoring my calls. I have lots of evergreen trees and more mature terrain on the block, but I wouldn't call the area "dense forest." So be careful, if you live between a lot of trees you can often lose the signal. This time I noticed a gap in his historical heatmap tracking over that period. - I really don't like paying for GPS tracking as a subscription. However, the app works well enough and I get a reasonably accurate GPS location to decide what I need, so I'm willing to pay in that case. I also felt that the initial cost of the tracker was low enough to offset the running costs.