When you leave the house in the morning and say goodbye to your family, with a shotgun in your hand and a dog on a leash, you will probably be able to get home without the wild game and the shotgun, and you may even be a little delayed yourself.

But you won’t come home without your dog. Don’t even think about it.

Fortunately (for you and your dog), keeping track of your canine companion has never been easier, although you do have to make some decisions. Like most current technology, dog collars – for tracking and training – may make you shake your head, especially if you’re modern to the field.

Here’s an introduction to what’s out there, how it works, and the best uses for each.

Come down to earth or an eye in heaven

Your first decision will either keep you grounded or reach for the stars – hunters can choose a telemetry collar, a beeper/locator collar, or a GPS device strap. Clay Thompson, senior category manager at SportDOG, says each has advantages and disadvantages.

Telemetry collars are still available on the market, but their operate has declined since GPS trackers improved. Thompson said they still have some good apps and the limitations are in the hands of the user.

“It really takes someone who has spent a lot of time looking for collars,” Thompson said of the ability to put the technology to good operate. Telemetry collars send a radio frequency to a tracking receiver held by the hunter. The system will indicate the dog’s direction through the volume and intensity of a series of beeps, and some experienced handlers can even tell how far away the dog is. While there are dog systems available, including the Marshall PowerPoint and PowerMax tracking collars and tracking receiver, telemetry is actually the instrument of choice for falconers, who often operate these devices to track their birds.

Signaling units

Audible signals are much more common and work on the principle of a motion sensor to determine what the dog is doing (either moving or in a specific location). They can be programmed to make different sounds based on this information. For example, if your dog is 150-200 meters ahead of you in dense cover, the beeper will emit a thunderous sound that you can operate to locate and approach your dog; the tone is different when the dog is moving.

For example, the SportDOG Upland Hunter 1875 has nine possible sounds, including beeps, hawk calls, bobwhite quail calls, and high-to-low beeps. It can be heard from a distance of up to 500 meters, has an instant location function and allows you to track up to three dogs.

The Garmin Delta Upland XC has a half-mile range (audible for a quarter of a mile) and has four beeps and a two-point beep. It can also be expanded to three dogs.

GPS

If you have any experience with today’s smartphones and live by Google Maps, then a GPS device will be more familiar to you and will provide much more information about your dog’s whereabouts. Even with all the technology we have in our hands, it still remains a mystery to most.

Thompson says the misconception about GPS is that the mobile device sends a signal to a satellite, and the satellite sends it to the collar, ultimately reporting the dog’s location. Fortunately, it’s not that complicated and your dog doesn’t have to wear a satellite terrestrial station around his neck – that would really sluggish down the chase.

Take a look at your mobile device. The brief, stout rod is the GPS antenna. Its task is to listen to satellites. Your dog’s collar has it too; listens to the same satellites orbiting between 18,000 and 20,000 km above the Earth.

(For the truly curious, it starts with a “constellation” of satellites orbiting the Earth. There are currently five satellites in orbit – US GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, the EU’s Galileo, Japan’s Michibiki and China’s BeiDou. Units sold in the US rely on 31 US GPS satellites and 24 Russian GLONASS satellites.)

“When you’re hunting and tracking your dog, you’re constantly communicating with different satellites,” Thompson said. “You can have as few as four (which is needed for exact positioning on the ground) or you can have eight or 10 satellites from different constellations. But when one of them disappears from view and you no longer receive his data, another has appeared to take his place.

With 55 satellites to choose from, you’re only likely to lose signal if you get into an extremely dense canopy or descend into the interior of a canyon and lose line of sight with the four satellites you need. These are extreme cases, Thompson said.

Satellite locations securely in your hand, look back at the handheld and collar and you’ll find a long, winding antenna. These two are talking to each other over and over again on a radio frequency. Once everyone finds their spot on the ground, their coordinates are mapped onto your handheld device, giving you a picture – with pretty good accuracy – of where you and your dog are. The mapping system gives you a point of reference. And now you’ve reached another fork in the decision-making road.

Where is my dog?

Now that the dog and the PDA know where they are, they need to tell you. You have three options for defining things.

The topographic map can be entirely contained within your handheld device, allowing you to track more than one dog and handler on the same map. A good example of this system is SportDOG TEK 2.0. It can track up to 21 collars and handheld devices and comes with loaded, full-color topographic maps from 1 to 100,000.

You can choose a system that communicates with your smartphone (but is not dependent on a cellular network) and plots your course in an app on your phone or even on your Apple watch. Dogtra’s Pathfinder 2 works with Apple and Android products and tracks up to 21 dogs within a 15km radius. Dogs’ positions appear on maps on your smartphone.

The third option doesn’t involve a map at all, but a elementary visual box that tells you where you are in relation to your dog (and other people you may be hunting with). It shows you in the center of the screen and the position of the dogs in relation to that point, and also shows whether those dogs are moving and in what direction. In this case, SportDOG’s TEK 1.5 can report the location of up to 12 dogs within a 7-mile radius.

Location isn’t everything, as each of these collars can be purchased with an e-collar option that allows you to train your dog while you’re at it.

Nowadays, forests are characterized by advanced technologies, so although returning home without game is understandable – it is the hunting that counts, not the harvest – there is really no reason to return home without a dog.