If you live in an urban or semi-urban environment, you may live in fear that your dog will unexpectedly leave the yard of your house. And if you live near a busy road, you may want to be alerted immediately, so that you can quickly find and retrieve your precious Rover.
That’s the situation that we’ve been in. Fortunately, I’ve found a workable solution with Whistle Go Explore ($129.95 + cellular subscription). It’s far from perfect, but is preferable to having to rely on the kindness of neighbors to spot your dog and call you before something bad happens.
We had been using an eye-catching collar with both the dog’s name and our phone number inscribed. Now that we know that our two dogs will tend to head right for a busy street, we wanted something that could let us know faster and pinpoint on a map just where they’re located.
Whistle’s latest dog tracking device (the Whistle Go Explore) is a significant improvement over the previous Whistle 3 model. The battery life is dramatically increased over the Whistle 3 (jumping from an average of 7 days to an impressive 20 days). The battery life does vary, depending on how much time the dog remains within your Wi-Fi network, as opposed to ranging outside the network, where the module has to fall back on less-energy-efficient cellular coverage.
The Whistle Go Explore also adds a handy night light that you can turn on using the free mobile Whistle app. You can have the light flash quickly for higher visibility or flash slowly to conserve the internal battery life.
The Whistle app works well to help you track your dog and check the module’s battery strength, as needed. That said, there are some drawbacks to the Whistle Go Explore. We’ve experienced an occasional false alert that our dog had left the yard. This glitch could be a result of GPS tracking not being available inside a house (which would affect similar products). Or possibly the dog was settling into an area of the house with less-than-optimal Wi-Fi reception.
The other issue is that it can take several minutes before you’re alerted by text, push message, or email — that’s after your dog has already left the defined safe zone of your yard. A lot can happen in those few minutes.
Despite the cost and technical limitations, the Whistle Go Explore is a fair trade-off for a little bit piece of mind.