WiFi’s a good idea to explore but potentially a battery life killer.
For BLE, the collar can listen for beacons and activate if it can’t hear any. This means you can put beacons part-way to the perimeter of the geofence.
You could do similar with additional WiFi - or even just use a pile of ESP8266’s in AP mode that the collar listens for. Will confuse the neighbours with the number of extra ‘routers’ in the area.
Yes, that sounds pretty cool as an idea too. As long as it can see my home WiFi or some BLE beacons it’s probably still safely home.
look at what most of the commercial available trackers are doing on the market, ble and wi-fi sniffing and if that does not work gnss
I was expecting lower than 20mAh for WiFi, but to my surprise is around 100mAh for receive. Section 4.4 ESP32.
It seems that with scan every 10 minutes with 1900mAh battery you have one month of operation. [Example 3: Upgraded Hardware | Low Power WiFi Datalogger | Adafruit Learning System].
Panthers, Lions, Tigers, possibly Lynx maybe, but a bit big for a domestic cat apart from Maine Coon …
It is just an example. Every 30 minutes scanning* and you need 650mAh battery for one month.
If the cat is fat, it’s a good exercise to loose fat 
* the example is with connecting and transmitting - many seconds and more consuming
Hi 
, Recently I got a chance to be hands-on with the latest SenseCAP T1000, It is a compact LoRaWAN tracker that utilizes GNSS/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth for precise indoor & outdoor location tracking. I think this will be suitable for your application. You can find more details here at https://www.seeedstudio.com/sensecap-t1000-tracker product page.
don’t think the formfactor lends it to pet tracking
Poor battery life and weird form for animal. But it seems a nice product for other applications.
@Piet_Pillay @clv , It’s a family of devices, so you can customize or use the best option for you, You can see they have a pet tracker-specific one for the situation.
Regarding the battery, I think it has decent battery life, and when you disable the sensor and reduce the sync time you can achieve better backup.
Thank you, they seem nice. But I found only these trackers from them.
@clv They are on Kickstarter and will be live on coming days. You can apply for the pre-launch here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seeed/sensecap-t1000-track-what-you-care-with-no-boundaries .
That is one unholy mess of aspirational marketing - even at a basic level of “Supports LoRaWAN® network which provides city grade coverage” but then it gets really surreal with “SOS button for emergency reporting and automatically switch to high-frequency data transmission” with a picture of someone out in woodland - which isn’t known for its RF penetration.
It’s got potential as a nice toolkit, but it doesn’t yet exist and the collective experience of the forum leans away from using LoRaWAN for tracking - particularly when the antenna is very close to the ground.
@descartes I’m using the product now as a beta test, please let me know the concern you mentioned specifically. Please note, I don’t want to spread any false news or spam bombing here. If you find any mistake in my above post, please mention that, I love to clarify or correct it.
Specifically? The generalisations that I mentioned - the assumption that there is uniform coverage in urban environments and the assertion that it can be used as an SOS tracker without any qualification of connectivity.
You have not made a mistake in your posts because thus far you’ve only linked to an external site and repeated their marketing materials. This is a forum for the practical application of LoRaWAN so it would be more appropriate to provide some real world info, like are you using one for pet tracking? If so, for what sort of animal, what uplink size & interval, typical RSSI & SNR, accuracy of the location for GPS, how well does the WiFi lookup work, have you deployed any BLE beacons, if so, how many, how far apart, how well does the RSSI triangulation work compared to the GPS, what is the average battery life, can you do a battery change so you don’t have to tie the animal to the charging point, and any other pertinent technical details you have investigated so far.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by.
I shared the product as the original poster and followers might see it will be useful, and I don’t want to share all the reviews and parameters you mentioned here, which I will do especially in my blog or specifically as a review, this is a forum and we can also share the insights about a product if someone asks about suitable one And hat’s why shared the product link, so they can do their own research more and decide whether wants to go or not. Hope you understand.
And this forum is meant to help people and share knowledge. Not to promote blogs, reviews and (outdated) knowledge stored all over the Internet.
Just sharing a link to a product without providing some insight into how a product performs (if you know and as beta tester you should) is half the job. For people visiting the forum the insights are the useful part, ten minutes with Google wil provide a product link and the sellers marketing blurb which of course never mentions the limitations and real world performance.
@kersing I understand, and you can see I didn’t just share the link as you mentioned, I shared a bit about the information and even replayed the specific question asked.
That particular claim is entirely missleading.
The only ‘connectivity’ I see mentioned is LoRaWAN, WiFi and Bluetooth, did I miss something ?
So implying that someone wandering in the wilderness or woods with a pile of equipment, so pressumably some distance from civilisation (and LoRaWAN,WiFi,Bluetooth) could use the device as an SOS alarm, is a complete non-starter.
Also interesting to note that Seeed, who appear to be developing the product, have so much confidence in it that they want consumers or users to fund it.
It’s actually worse - the WiFi is for MAC address sniffing / lookup and the BLE is only if you have beacons setup.
So the only uplink is via LoRaWAN for all those “gateways in the woods” situations.