RF ID Cat Flaps

[TimO]

I noticed that there are now a couple of brands of cat flap, which operate using the "normal" RF ID chips that cats can be injected with.

Pet Porte    /    Sure Flap

Has anyone tried these?  They seem like a good idea, since there's no tag to be lost, and most mogs are chipped these days anyway.  I wonder how reliable they are though, and how close the cat has to be to make sure they trigger correctly.  (There may be other brands, but those are the only two I've found so far).

I've also seen some that us RF ID, but with the chip in a tag attached to the collar as in other designs, as well as ones with IR collars, and the old magnetic style ones.  Using a tag, even a lightweight RF one seems a bit antiquated once they've perfected the technology to use injected devices, but possibly they work better, and the flaps are certainly cheaper!

[border-rider]

We had one of the collar tag ones years ago for our old puss

It worked fine, but after a it broke the replacement had a much smaller sensing volume.  Our cat used to use her paw to open the catflap and then step through, and the second one wasn't sensitive enough to operate at arm's length, as it were, and she wouldn't use it

The RFID chips that cats have injected usually need a (very) short-range reader, being damn small,  and I think they'd need a hell of a lot of power in the catflap to sense a cat at any sort of distance.  I suspect the cat has to actually enter the tunnel for the catch to drop.  Which might be OK...

[Adrian]

Never mind the cats, when can I have that to replace my Barclaycard One Pulse card? Injected  in the arm somewhere near the wrist or the back of the hand say.

[Basil]

Mate of mine had these many years ago.  Only trouble was, he had two cats and you couldn't buy two collars with the same RF.  He had tp have two cat flaps.
Hopefully, these "new" ones don't do that to you.

[andygates]

Our cats never learned to look after themselves because they could flee to safety.  Meant that they kept getting beaten up when we moved. 

[border-rider]

Ours worked well as old Rosie could taunt the local Tom and then sprint for home and safety.  Until one day he tried to follow and knocked the whole thing clean out of the door and down the passageway

[mike]

we tried them but our bloody cats would sit at the catflap and peer out for hours, so the flap would click open / locked all the time they were sitting there.  Drove me absolutely nuts and got through the battery in the flap in about a week.  We changed back.

[border-rider]

Ours was mains-powered, but when we had it in the kitchen door in Volio Towers #1, Rosie would sit just outside, as you say, at just the right distance for the catch to jitter up and down ceaselessly until we caved in and opened the damn door for her

At Volio Towers #2 it was fitted in a door into  passageway  out of earshot...