Pavel's Blog

The morning after Zap came back, Kathleen said that there just had to be some technology to help us keep track of our cats' locations. I said I was sure there was, but it was probably pretty pricey.

"Do you know how much I would pay not to go through that again?" She replied quickly and emphatically, so I went Googling. I found a number of interesting hits, including one from a company that mostly sells to hunters for tracking their dogs, another one that uses GPS but is mostly for dogs and wasn't yet available, and finally something that looked more promising for us.

The LoCATor Pet Tracking System is made by a company that has for years supplied wildlife telemetry equipment and more recently made a move into the consumer space. Their cat collars are very friendly looking, unlike some of the other, more dog-oriented ones, with a small radio transmitter firmly attached. The round transmitter is roughly the diameter of a quarter and about 1/2-inch thick. It has a friction-fit plastic cover closing over a small circuit board and a flat round battery. The collars come in several bright colors and cost $50 each.

As consumer-friendly as the collars are, the radio receiver makes up for it in all-out geekiness. It's a simple rectangular metal box of the sort commonly used in electronics prototyping, about 8" by 4" by 2", with a speaker, a couple of switches that look like they escaped from the front of an oscilloscope, a meter, a potentiometer, and a push-button channel selector. The really striking thing about the receiver, though, is the large directional antenna, which is a squared-off figure eight about the size of a legal pad. A 30-channel receiver costs $200.

The transmitters simply send out an audible ping once a second on one of 30 radio channels. By setting the receiver to the correct channel and slowly turning in a circle, it's relatively easy to figure out which direction the cat (or at least the collar) is in. The pinging gets dramatically louder (and the meter needle swings more strongly) the closer you are to the transmitter, and one of the switches lets you select between long-, medium-, and close-range signal attenuation. On the long-range setting, in open country, you can pick up the signal from as much as a mile away; in our more hilly suburban area, we can detect the cats a healthy block away. On the close-range setting, a detectable ping indicates the transmitter is within about 10-15 feet. This ranging feature makes it quite straightforward to narrow the search for an errant cat from a neighborhood down to a particular shrub or hedge.

We ordered a transmitter and two collars (one for each of Enterprise and Zap, our two cats most inclined to roam), asked for UPS Red shipping, and took delivery the next afternoon, in time to put the collars on before letting Zap back out again. (We kept him indoors for a day or two after his return, just to give him—and us—some stability.)

The collars have afforded us enormous peace of mind. We now know that the cats spend most of their outside time in the next cul-de-sac over, not down in the coyote-laden greenbelt. When Zap and/or Enterprise don't come home before dark (and it's always one of those two who's truant), we know we can track them down should we decide to, and we've done so on several occasions.

Modulo a few glitches and adventures, the money spent on the receiver and four collars has been a negligible cost for the huge benefits in anxiety relief. Where once the dark was a mysterious cover for whatever cat dangers our imaginations could conjure, now it's an easily lifted veil over simple, harmless, wild kitty oats.

What a win.