I am a looking for feedback in terms of reliability, lifespan, drop-off possibilities, user friendly interface of the website and possibility for the stakeholders to check the data of a single animal.
have you considered bypassing expensive satellites altogether?
https://www.celltracktech.com/
A colleague used Lotek collars for wolves. The collars were supposed to drop off, but a year after the collar was supposed to come off, the animal was sighted with collar intact. By this time, the collar had ceased to provide any location data on the animal. So I guess that says something about longevity, but this is not terribly useful if the collar fails to work properly.
Hi, a colleague of mine recently fitted to cougars with lotek collars and both failed...
Hi, I am using vectronic collars for wolves and I am happy with them. Still didn't have oportunity to test if the drop off works well. I can only hope so. I am happy with the interface too. Good luck!
Hi Elena,
Thank you for the answer.
In the meanwhile, we deployed 11 Followit collars on cheetahs. The first deployment went well, and the drop-off works well too. We started having issues when refurbishing the collars. Some failed after the first refurbishment and most failed after the second. We decided not to use them anymore. It is a pity because the collars were light and worked well during the first deployment.
The company went bankrupt and now has been bought so they may produce again collars, hopefully with improvements.
I have worked with both lotek iridium and vectronics argos, all worked well in the field, over 85% tranmission rate in steppe mountains. Lotek drop off worked well
When refurbished, did not work well
Mohammad
We used SirTrack on cheetah. The average collar success rate (number of successfully fixes vs. number of attempted fixes) was ~86.2%, and that was in a fairly thick mopane woodland. They were also nice and lightweight 465g, and had a pre-scheduled drop although we replaced them before they were activated so I can't speak to its success.
Vectronics on lions was fairly hit or miss in regards to assistance when collars failed, but when they did work they worked well.
We have been very happy with vectronic collars for our work on muskoxen in Greenland. The basic parts of the collars have been very reliable, the costumer support is top notch and stakeholder acces to single collars can be achieved via their Inventa portal and apps for phones and tablets. Vectronic offer a range of different collars the most advanced has and option for up to 32Hz continuous acceleration recording.
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