Trackers

[Honu]

My lovely lab spends her life either trying (and occasionally succeeding) in escaping from our garden or running off when we are out. It's not a lack of understanding of commands, she just loves doing her own thing. After a couple of hours she comes home!
I need a tracker so I .know roughly where to look. We live in a tiny village surrounded by arable fields. Not a lot of mobile signals around here. Not sure about GPS. I don't want to know how fit she is or how many steps she has done, I just want to know where she is.
Anyone care to share their experiences?
Thanks

We use tractive . My dog has bolted before , so it's paid for itself a couple times over .

We have Tractive also. Also a lab.

If you don't have much mobile coverage, tractive isn't going to be helpful for live tracking.

GPS trackers like Tractive use satellites to pinpoint location so mobile phone signal shouldn't be an issue. Bluetooth trackers, like apple Air Tags rely on mobile phone signal.

It sounds like you need a GPS tracker. We use Tractive and find it very user friendly. It does get expensive though as it's a subscription service. A one off air tag purchase would have been way cheaper.

GPS trackers like Tractive use satellites to pinpoint location so mobile phone signal shouldn't be an issue

They use GPS to track location, but they have a sim card which relies on the mobile network to report that location back to you.

They're not particularly clear about this imo, I've personally found two dogs wearing tractive collars which their owners couldn't locate due to being in an area without mobile coverage.

Can you train the dog to come to a whistle?

I had an escape artist in the early 2000's (jut so you know about the state of technology!).
Mine would be back home within 10 minutes of me blowing the whistle whiteout fail!
Not ideal, but the sound carries well, especially over open fields- we lived on a hill so had similar effect.

Ah that's interesting @DataPup.

A tracker won’t stop your dog causing an accident, getting hit by a car or causing another hazard.

You need to look at security and also why your dog feels the need to escape.

Mine understands the whistle absolutely! On any training course she's brilliant. But just sometimes near home I blow the whistle, she turns and looks at me and then trots off in the opposite direction. She's gone about an hour then either someone brings her home or she comes home on her own. She's not even going to somewhere particular.
We have a large garden, not the sort of place you can turn into Fort Knox, and a constant war of attrition with regard to boundaries. We sometimes win for a bit.Tractive talks about setting boundaries, does anyone have experience of this? Indoors we have no mobile signal at all but we use WiFi calling - anyone use this?
I don't mind paying for the system, I'd just like to know where she is once she's run out of sight!

If you're in an area without signal then a tracker is pointless, really.

But what's happening at the moment is so dangerous and you seem rather blasé about it - what's to stop your dog being hit by a car or getting into a field of sheep, for example?

If she can't be contained in the garden and runs off on walks then she needs to stay on a lead or house line.

The problem is that if she can get out of your garden she can also get into someone else's garden. Every time she escapes you are actually breaking the law by allowing her to be "loose on the public highway" or on private land. Some people are dog phobic, others have their own children, dogs or cats and really don't appreciate a stray dog wandering onto their property no matter how "lovely" she may be. You really need to be addressing the real issue. You may have been lucky up to now but at some point you will get a visit from the council dog warden or your dog will end up in an accident/being injured or poisoned through no fault of its own.