FitBark GPS Dog Location & Health Monitor

This is my third attempt at a tracking collar for my dog, and I think it may be the one that will work.Let me acknowledge that our situation presents some challenges that or not present everywhere. Specifically, we are in a rural setting where the only cell phone provider with decent service is Verizon. Second, we have hilly terrain which makes it difficult to use any system based on RF communication. And third, our dog is a livestock guardian dog who wanders freely as she works.We started with a Whistle Go because a friend in another town had enjoyed splendid results with it. I'm reasonably confident that it would have worked well for us, except that AT&T service is so awful where we live. Having returned the Whistle Go, we next tried a Dogtra Pathfinder, which is really more setup for episodic used by hunters than as a routine tracking collar. Because of this, the Pathfinder has much more limited battery life, so short that it would have worn out both our dog and us to keep it charged. It also is heavily dependent on RF communication between the remote and the dog’s collar, which was difficult with our hilly terrain.I think we have the solution we need with the FitBark. Some pros:1. I shrugged off all the information about monitoring my dog’s activity levels each day, but I must now admit that I find it strangely captivating. Because she’s a livestock guardian dog, she’s active at night, so I check each morning to see when she was active and when she was resting. Maybe it will become boring to me later, but not yet.2. Customer service is nothing short of phenomenal. You must use the app on your phone, but you can ask a question via chat and depend on getting an answer from a knowledgeable person within minutes, 24 HOURS A DAY. I know because I rubbed my dog at 11:30 one night and realized that her collar had come off somewhere within her 6 acre Safe Place. I reached out in panic to customer service, and they stayed with me and held my hand – using all the many resources available to them - until I found the collar about 18 difficult hours later.Now some cons:1. The FitBark has great battery life. I can go for two weeks or so without charging the battery, which is as good as I'm going to need. However, when I must charge it, I have to pry off the plastic cover with a screwdriver, attach a magnetic clip to the device, and then later snap the cover back in place after charging. So far that system has held up okay, but I question how long it will last.2. No doubt to conserve battery life, FitBark is slow to respond with our dog’s location. It usually takes 3-5 minutes to get an update on her location when she moves. To be honest, that’s probably as fast as we need, but it is disconcerting to know she has moved but to see her old location still shown in the app.3. Because our dog roams a large area routinely, her Safe Place is equally large, and as long as she is in her Safe Place, the FitBark cannot and will not tell us where she is. There are plenty of times when we know she is in her Safe Place but still would like to know her location. That is impossible with the FitBark. I get it that it prolongs battery life to turn off the GPS locator when her collar is within wifi range, and I’m grateful for that. But how about this: it should be simple to program the app to allow me to turn on the GPS locator for, say 20 minutes, just long enough to get a location on her, and then have it automatically turn back off. I would know that if I do that all day long I would run the battery down much faster, but every now and then you really want to know where your dog is.

We bought this to keep tabs on our dog while he's outside off-leash on our 24-acre farm. Every bit of marketing from the company implies that it would be perfect for this, and we were lead to believe you could just watch a "live" dot of our dog's location on a map in the app on our phone. This could not be farther from the truth.First, the device normally connects to wifi in the house, so when the dog is in range of wifi, its status is "at home" and simply shows a dot at the location specified for "home". If you happen to have a broad wifi connection that works outdoors, this will prohibit the device from ever even turning its GPS tracking capability on, and will show your dog at "home" even though he could be far away, in range of wifi.Second, when the dog does eventually leave wifi range, you will get a notification that your dog has "left home". However, this takes up to about 10 MINUTES to happen, i.e. your dog could be *long gone* by the time you are even first notified.Third, once your dog has left wifi and you're already 10 minutes behind the ball, now it's time to track your dog. To do this, you need to open the app-- which by the way FORCES you to turn on full-time location privileges on your phone, or it refuses to let you proceed-- and navigate to an option called "where's my dog". It then takes 10+ MORE minutes to actually get a GPS fix on your dog, and guess what, the location that it returns could be up to 10+ minutes outdated. We've tried to use this feature maybe a dozen times over the last year, and only twice has it even worked to return a fix on our dog. Both of those times, the dog was eventually found nowhere near the provided fix. The other times, our dog had finally wandered back within range of wifi, leaving us with no clue where he was or where he had been.***The GPS tracking feature is NOWHERE NEAR REALTIME***In short, this product is totally useless and worthless for our application. I could see it *possibly* being useful if you only need to know a very general location for your dog, i.e. if your dog completely runs away from home you can at least get an idea the general direction he or she is headed. But it is completely useless at pinpointing a location unless your dog runs away and then stays in the same place for a long time.

I'll update later when I've had this longer. I can speak to the ease of setting up the Fit Bark, the responsiveness of customer service, and that it knows my dog is home. :)The device fully charged in an hour. I spent that time setting up my account including my dog info on the App for Android users. The packaging and instructions are unbelievably clear -- better than almost any device you'd buy these days. The video that was part of the set up process showed how to hook the device onto Cookie's collar and it worked exactly like that. Super easy.I did contact Customer Service via text message that is right on the app because I got confused about the Blue Tooth thing. I thought it would connect with my phone's Blue Tooth. But no. It connects to the app which is on the phone. This saves battery life if your dog and your phone are both near you (or at least near each other) which is true about 95% of the time for me. You do need to give the app permission to "always run" in the background.I opted for the $7.95 per month GPS tracking fee paid ahead for one year. And we live in a Verizon zone so no problem there. You do NOT need a Verizon account though. This is a deal between Fit Bark and Verizon, not between you and Verizon.Truly I hope I never have a chance to update that it helped me find my lost dog. I consider this insurance is all. But for now, it accurately places her: "Cookie is Home." It needed to connect to our home wifi to do that.So far -- I like it a lot and Cookie doesn't even seem to notice it. Super light weight. A bit of peace of mind for a much loved dog.