Modern GPS dog collars are one of the great hunting inventions of my lifetime. Even a dog that doesn’t range far disappears in tall grass, leaving you wondering where it is while on point. And worst-case scenario is that a close-working dog takes off and outruns the collar. Terrain also interferes with radio signals. Other times, technology just fails. It’s rare, but I have had GPS collars conk out, leaving me wondering where my dog is. That’s when you need a backup.
The Garmin Alpha LTE Dog Tracker is a security blanket for your GPS. Old school dog trainers would roll their eyes, but to them, dogs were working animals one step above livestock. To us, dogs are family members, and heaven forbid we don’t know where they are at all times. Having lost a dog overnight, I can tell you it’s a traumatic experience that I could have avoided with a little bit of tech if it had been available back then.
Which brings us to the Alpha LTE Dog Tracker. Because it’s a cell tracker, it has no range limitations as long as you have cell service. If your dog hops a freight train to El Paso, you can track it. The Alpha LTE packs all this peace of mind into a roughly 2-inch by 3-inch package that weighs under 2 ounces and slides on the thin nylon collars that come with most dog GPS and/or trainer units. This is good because our dogs already wear enough collars, and their necks can only hold so many. It has one button, a phone app, and a subscription you have to pay for.
The Garmin LTE is not only a backup unit, either. If you have a phone and an LTE tracker, you can follow your dog in the field without the expense of a GPS rig, although you risk losing signal if you’re hunting in a cellular dead zone. But you can slide it onto a standard e-collar and be good to go. It’s best when integrated with Garmin’s Alpha line, enabling you to switch back and forth between GPS and LTE.
The app records tracks from five minutes up to two hours long (you can save them afterward). You can choose from a variety of maps, including satellite imagery. Hunters can also make and share waypoints. The first track we tried on our daily walk around the block was accurate to the point of showing where we crossed the street so the neighbor could pet Zeke. I also left it on him at home while I drove to the gun club, and it marked his location from up to 15 miles away, far beyond the reach of my usual GPS collar. Battery life, in warm weather anyway, was almost exactly 24 hours.
The downside is that the subscription adds $50 a year to the price of the Alpha LTE. Given the amount of money we send on sporting dogs and the even larger amount of emotion we invest in them, what’s a $299 collar and $50 a year to help keep them safe?
