Anyone got a GPS tracker on their cat?

[Mrs Pingu]

We think Pumpkin is a 'six dinner Sid', i.e she's either got a secret feeder or she's breaking in other cats flaps and helping herself.
She's getting fat, and worse, because she seems to be intolerant to some foods it's making her ill as well.   

She's only a year old and loves to go out (possibly related to the food) so I'm loathe to go straight for the nuclear option and not let her out ever again, without trying other options first.
I'm looking at the possibility of a GPS tracker for her so we can find out where she's getting fed. The Loc8tor is no good as it's just an RF finder - I want something that will tell me where she's been.

Any experiences?

[nikki]

We attached a logger to a cat-sized dog on a residency in October, if that helps?



(result)



http://global.mobileaction.com/product/product_i-gotU_USB.jsp

I've got one somewhere, but haven't used it for a while. It's a single button interface with 2 different-coloured LEDs to signal if it's on and tracking. I can't remember if you need their (Windows) software to get to the gpx file, of if that's just for organising, but it'll generate a track with points at something like 10 second intervals. It's small and light enough to consider as an option, I reckon - just need to figure out attaching it securely!

[Mrs Pingu]

Did the dog only run in straight lines?

[Kim]

Small dog hyperactivity^[1] level well in excess of the Nyquist threshold, methinks.   


_{[1] Tautology}

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Could you put a collar tag and/or a paper collar on her saying "please do not feed"?

[Mrs Pingu]

That is also on my list of things to try, EG. Paper collar??

[nikki]

Geocache log-book and an Ikea pencil: combine the tracking with the nil-by-mouth request

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

That is also on my list of things to try, EG. Paper collar??

A collar made of paper with "please stop feeding my cat" on it, fastened with a small piece of sellotape.

[Mrs Pingu]

That is also on my list of things to try, EG. Paper collar??

A collar made of paper with "please stop feeding my cat" on it, fastened with a small piece of sellotape.

Thanks, I did get round to JFGI eventually will give it a try being as its free for practically unlimited attempts.

Poor thing's just barfed up all her dinner/dinners.

[spesh]

Small dog hyperactivity^[1] level well in excess of the Nyquist threshold, methinks.   


_{[1] Tautology}

Leaving aside frequency of position change being greater than the sampling frequency, I'm not sure civilian-grade GPS resolves finely-enough in position when a dog gets into tail-chasing mode.

[TimO]

You can easily get actual "DO NOT FEED" cat collars, which may be a slightly better option.

The tracker Nicci shows, is actually design for geotagging photographs.  The idea is that you synchronise you camera's time to GPS (ie UTC) time, and then the software can add the Lat Lot to the EXIM data on the images.

As I recall, it uses Windows software to download the GPX data, but I believe someone was working on Linux software to do the same, so slightly simpler and less clunky software may be available, if all you want to do is dump a GPX file onto your PC.

There's an active tracker available now, which has GSM and WiFi, so you can track the cat whilst it is out wandering around, and more importantly, if the collar goes AWOL (because of the safety release, to stop the cat throttling itself), you can probably recover it!

PawTrack

It looks to be a bit bulkier than traditional cat collars, but it is a lot smaller than similar devices built for dogs.

If Kai still visited the house, I'd get one for him, but Zev is much more the homebody, and doesn't ever seem to go far from the house, so the expenditure would be wasted on her.  Male cats do tend to wander a lot further than females, theoretically in search of mates, although that's no longer a problem with Kai, since he was "done" shortly after I acquired him.