Hi John, why don't give a look at followit?their new collars seem suitable for your needs!

I have quite good experience with Followit collars using them on reindeer. The first we used was in 2002 and then 2 out of 20 broke down. Now even the reindeer herders are using Followit quite frequently and they are satisfied however for daily use in the reindeer herding they are quite expensive. We have also use Vectronics GPSs even though they are supposed to be good we have had a great deal of problems with them regarding downloading data. Had to send them to Germany for downloading etc. But in a large project where we have marked female reindeer and calves with radio-collars this has worked out just fine.

Cheers,

Anna

John, We have been using extensively African Wildlife Tracking (AWT) collars (but for large ungulates in Africa) with either satellite or UHF device as well as Lotek and Vetronic collars. I would suggest you also contact AWT as they have extensive experience outside Africa and on carnivores as well. I have been trying to download through UHF in the field in 2008-2009 in Africa on buffalo --> quite a pain as we needed to be quite close from the animals for a long period of time (to dl all the data) and animals were not easily approached in that particular area. I managed to dl around 60% of all the data on 12 collared buffalo in 2 herds (1 point every hour) in 6 weeks of field work across 8 months --> so you need to recapture the animals at the end to access the full dataset. Why don't rely simply on satellite acquisition? Or both (in order to benefit from advantages of both technologies). In terms of failure, we experienced around 8-12% of failure at the onset of the protocol out of 50 collars deployed on buffalo (but 100% failure on male!). Cheers, AleX

Dear John,

As you know we have tracked ocelots in the past with televilt collars. I believe televilt are now separated into Follwit and Telemetry Solutions. I have used the UHF remote download option with Telemetry Solutions GPS units with ring-necked pheasants. I had success with his, albeit my sample size was low. I imagine with a larger GPS collar, they have what you need. Sincerely, Aaron.

Hi John,

I don't have any experience with these specific brands but I used UHF download collars from Africa Wildfire Tracking. The interface is quite user friendly but the rate of success for the download was very low... You need to be very close to your animal (it was Spotted hyaenas) to get a chance to be successful. One of the major problem is that I had no way to know if I was close enough to try, and as the collars are not transmitting permanently but on a schedule basis to save battery life (every 10 min for my collars) you lose a precious time trying, failing, trying to get closer to the animal etc... So I would check if Lotek or Telemetry solutions provide such a service.

UHF download also requires to stay within a close range from your animal for quite an extended period of time (depending on how much data need to be retrieved), which can be tricky with some species.

Also this range decreases when the vegetation density increases...

You might consider satellite collars that will transmit your data over the net. However, they can be heavier that simple GPS ones and are often more expensive...

Hope it helps!

Best regards,

Stephanie

Not sure why ResearchGate is identifying me as Alexandre Caron. Finding too many problems writing posts using this site.

Hi, John

Our research team is familiar with the GPS machines Trimble 5700, Leica 500, Leica 1200 and Topcon with Zypher geodetic antenna to collect GPS data from remote. We can download data directly from the data card and/or using vsat. I hope in your research these would not be applicable, but you can directly ask your problem any one of the manufacturing companies.

K. Mahanta

We used African Wildlife Tracking GPS collars with download to cell phone towers on lions in South Africa. They downloaded every 20 hours, so transmitted VHF signals during those 20 hours, but then tried to send their GPS locations for the remaining 4 hours. Trying to work out if the animal was present but the collar wasn't on VHF mode or absent, was a challenge. Otherwise they worked well with good back-up from the company when a collar failed (they replaced it free of charge).

Interesting topic, and a lot of options are now available since I built my first collars for tracking cattle in ca. 1994-5. Presented the "Cows In Space" project at GIS.LIS 1996.

It is gratifying to see how the technology has spread, and the plethora of sources for tracking devices.

Hi John,

I have quite good experience with Followit collars using them on deer (Cervus elapus corsicanus) in Sardinia. In our research in 2009-2010, on 26 collars only one has had any problems. The collars had the GSM system to download data, GPS, VHF to approach the deer , UHF to download data in the field and drop-off to release. The collars are discharged in about 2 years with 1 fix every 4 hours.

Best of luck.

Thank you for all the feedback, everyone. I have researched several of the brands people have mentioned, but there are a few I had not yet heard of that I will be sure to look up. The biggest constraint we are facing is really weight. The collars we have right now are around 210g, which limits us to putting them only on the largest (usually male) individuals. If we could get the collar weight down to about 180g, we could put them on all the adult cats in our study area.

For remote download options, I've mainly been considering UHF since our research area has very spotty cell coverage. Any device that relies on remotely transmitting data via cell towers would be unlikely to work. I'd be interested in any collars that can transmit the data directly to satellites, but I think the collars that do this rely on a relatively small number of commercial satellites that may not always be in the right locations.

This advice is really helpful, especially the actual field accounts of how these collars performed. I know that these devices often do not live up to the manufacturers' claims.

Hello John,

I am also considering using Lotek GPS collars on ocelots in the Brazilian Pantanal. Talking to them I found that the best solution in my case would be the Minitracks, which are available in 160g, 210g and 270g (and smaller). These collars have the two-way communication option in VHF, which I understand has a greater distance for download/upload than UHF. I have worked in a research project with jaguars in the Pantanal where we used Televilt collars with UHF download, and I have to say that we had a lot of trouble. We deployed 10 collars and within 3-4 months half of them stopped acquiring fixes (with one actually failing completely in less than a month). The download range was also very short, and most of the time we had to approach within 20-50m of the animal inside dense bush, which many times caused it to move away. I have a colleague that has used Lotek GPS systems (although I am not sure which exactly) with maned wolfs in Brazil and he was very satisfied with the results in terms of very few failures and good percentage of fixes acquired.

I hope this helps a bit.

Cheers,

Henrique Concone

The question of VHF vs UHF and download range really becomes a question of how much antenna you can put exposed on the collar. If you have suboptimal antennas, range will be markedly reduced regardless of which band you choose. Getting an efficient antenna, however, will likely interfere with the animal's normal movements at least until it acclimates to the collar.

gerry

On Eurasian lynx and wolverines we have only been using collars made by vectronics as feel that they are the most reliable, although even here there are many failures. We have mainly used GSM download, but are testing both UHF and Irridium. We need to keep weights to around 300g, but I think Vectronics do have ligher models with only UHF download. I also saw that Followit just advertised a new generation of Irridium collars that were small. Lotek also have a VHF download GPS collar that is quite small.

I put out 7 collars from Blue Sky Telemetry (now rebranded as Skorpa Telemetry) on dingoes. The collars had UHF remote download function but none of them worked. In fact, every component (including the remote download function) failed. We got no refund because the company went into receivership, so it was a disappointing experience.

If you haven't already seen it there is a review paper on the success of GPS deployments on mammals in Australia (at http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/AM12021.htm). I don't think any of the collars had the remote download function, but it may provide a useful summary.

On roe deer, cheetah and white tailed sea eagle we have a lot experience with Vectronic collars (around 200-250g) using different methods of downloading (via handhold or GSM). Anyway, we also tested collars from other companies on different animals in enclosures. I would suggest you GPS-collars from e-obs (www.e-obs.de): low failure rate, excellent partly individual service (it´s a small company), most experience on birds (means low weight) and best price.

Good luck!

Had excellent results with ~35 two-year deployments of large Lotek 3000L collars (store-on board) on Dall's sheep in 2004-2008; however, dropoff mechanisms all failed. May not be important if you can afford to not retrieve some collars or can recaptture.

I have had good success with tags from www.e-obs.de. Their website is minimal, but their tags have many options including remote download, break-away mechanisms, GSM, GPS, accelerometers, activity informed gos fix schedules, etc.

We published a paper last year on their performance, see my RG page for a download.

Dear all,

The Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the Swiss Ornithological Institute have used gadgeds made by e-obs GMBH, Germany. Please have a look at:

http://www.e-obs.de/products.html

They offer a range of devices for birds and mammals with UHF data download.

Good luck!

Beat

Thanks for those reviews. I had not yet heard of e-obs. So far the main contenders are Telemetry Solutions and Lotek as they are able to manufacture collars with all the desired bells and whistles at a very low weight. I've managed to contact several researchers that have used Telemetry Solutions, but have not yet found anyone who has used the Lotek minitrack 160. Drop off failure is certainly a concern as it has lost us thousands of datapoints in the past.

I'm not aware of any fail proof collars or fail proof drop off mechanisms, but a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada called Global Positioning Solutions has been making custom build collars for me for a decade and they do nice work. I've only used them on large ungulates, with good success, but I know they've made collars for marten.

I second Scott LaPoint's comments about e-obs. Lightweight and very reliable. They worked great on coatis and agoutis. The only problem we encountered was caused by ocelots damaging their external antennas, which made it difficult/impossible to relocate the animals (this could be solved with a redesigned antenna for this species, or the addition of a VHF transmitter in the collar). The fix rate (% of successful GPS fixes) was not very good for the ocelots, which could have been caused by: 1) dense forest canopy on BCI, Panama, 2) use of hollow logs for resting, or 3) broken antenna. I suspect that the GPS fix rate will be better in S Texas. Using ACC informed GPS fix schedules should also help maximize data collection. There is a bit of a learning curve involved in setting up the e-obs collar settings to optimal/desired performance, but overall, these are wonderful collars.

I'm currently working on my own collar design based on the SPOT Connect from GlobalStar. I'm currently at ~2 kg, but that's mainly due to the huge packaging that's being used, and could be trimmed quite easily. The units that I'm making are about $400 per in parts and labor, $100 per year in service fees, and can send back up to 41 characters of remote data along with lat/long and a timestamp every 10 mins. These transponders are capable of sending back data remotely from just about anywhere on land with a view of the sky, as they're satellite-based. I've actually been trying to find cat people to work with for my PhD research. We should talk further.

"My research team and I are in the market for lightweight, remote-downloadable GPS collars to use on bobcats and ocelots"

who is the donor?

Don't know if you got you collars yet, but I have deployed UHF/GSM download Followit (previous Televild) on leopards with remote activated drop off. I was well pleased with these collars as they had a fix rate of up to 98%. All collars also dropped on activation. However, the remote download option (UHF) were less successfull and I could only download data within a 100m or closer (vegetation was very dense and mountanious terrain). I have a short report here; http://www.welgevonden.org/leopard_research/Progressreport6.pdf. Followit now have very small irriduim download options that will be suited for you cats. Good luck.

Look at Lotek. The Argos or Globalstar options are probably what you are looking for.

Telenax has now GPS+UHF units starting from 30 grm, is very versatile and really practical with an android app and a tablet. But for ocelot and bobcats you can use Iridium, and those weight 150 gr or more.