First Successful Trap Deployment

Father and Brother in Law and myself put together a corral trap with a remote drop a few months ago. It took some time to get the battery power up to snuff but we finally got it holding a charge for longer than a couple days. Dropped the trap on nine little piggies last night! Just little ones, but its a start!


Gotta love it when a plan comes together!


Concerned citizen trying to join the party late. DIdn't stick around, unfortunately.

Congratulations on building a successful trap!

Keep After 'Em!

Little uns grow into big uns. Way to go beats

Thanks all! I thought I would include a little bit of a builder list for the trap, I know I struggled to find information when building this, particularly the gate and remote release. The panels are 8 feet long and I believe 5 feet high. For those, we simply welded some square tube together into a big rectangle, and tacked wire panels to it. We did get a second set of wire panels with smaller gaps to run along the bottom to prevent smaller piglets from squeezing out, and bigger pigs from sticking their nose through it and potentially bending enough to bust out. The gate is just more wire panel with flat iron sandwiching it in place. We welded an eyelet onto the gate itself, plus another one next to it on the panel. We opted to use a metal rod with a cable attached to it to hold the trap door open. For the detonator, I ordered a KIAO time GSM relay kit. The instructions aren't great, but you can puzzle through it ok. Get a tracphone sim card from walmart and activate it, the cheapest plan is fine as you obviously dont need data, just minutes. The KIAO time GSM kit does come with an app for iphone and android, my brother and father in law have iphones and use the app, I have android and it doesnt seem to work. However, you can also text a command straight from your cell, so I utilize that feature and it works just fine. from there, we wired the GSM relay to a tractor battery and a large solar panel, and enclosed the relay in a utility box. It is a little crude, but with the bigger battery we are getting consistent drops from several hundred miles away. We probably made the trap a bit bigger then we needed to, but it can certainly hold some pigs. If anyone looking for more help and info needs anything, feel free to reach out. We all gotta work together! A few heavy duty things we did were to put a piece of flat iron on the interior side of the gate, attached to the bottom of the trap panel. When the gate drops, the bottom is completely covered by the flat iron, elimination the possibility of rooting back out. We also attached the panels at two points on each side, plus staked each panel to the ground with an eyelet in the middle of each section. Be sure to paint your corners in corresponding colors so you know which ones line up, our angles weren't 100% perfect so knowing where they all fit was helpful.

How long were they in the trap before you got there? Looks like it was the same night?

TK, it was same night. We live in the north Dallas Area, property is in Hamilton County, bout a 3 hour drive. We dropped the gate about 7:30 and just headed down there.

Nice build looks good

Congrats on building and trapping your first hogs via a wireless setup.

I have been doing that with my DIY setup for over a year now but have been having issues with the GSM switch lately.

Is the KIAO time GSM you are using working well? Did you need to add an external antenna?

I would love to know as I am about to buy one to see if it work in a low spot that I can't get the 3G units to work.

Good work! And, imho, you can't build a hog trap that's too large! Fill 'em up and empty 'em; then get ready for the next bunch! My largest one is a circular one, 28 feet across. In the last couple of years we've removed 81 hogs from it and our biggest, single night capture, was 17. It continues to produce, but I think we've gotten the hog population numbers down (at least for a while) so that the most we've snagged in one day is 7. We've also noticed that they've become trap-wary, so we catch younger pigs, but the older, wiser ones don't come into the enclosure as frequently any more. We have game cam pics of the adults standing outside the trap watching the youngsters mill around inside!

Hey Steve, its working well so far. If my memory serves me correctly, it came with an external antenna, 3 inch or so little black one with a wire that connects. We ran it to the top of the gate frame. Im 90% certain it came with the kit though. I dropped the gate remotely from a distance of about 200 miles and it took about 15 seconds to drop.

It has been interesting for us. We used a smaller battery and solar panel that just couldnt stay charged longer than a day. As a result, the trap sat there open but inoperable for a few months. Early on, we had 15-25 head sounders of mature animals, no piglets, coming in multiple times daily. Someone shot one of them in front of the trap, and we haven't seen that particular sounder since. We had that group of piglets hanging out, and another pair of sows and there litters are hanging out still as well. Hopefully we catch them slipping soon. Its kind of a catch 22. We built the trap to get rid of pigs, but now I want to see pigs so we can trap them. haha.

Thanks, I'm going to go ahead and order one.

The setup I have is on 3G and I can't get a signal at the property where I have my traps now.

I'm also curious as to why your system is consuming so much power. The way I set my system up the only power drain would be for the GSM switch. Does that 4G GSM switch use that much more power? The 3G one I have used would last 4 weeks on a 12v 12amp sealed AGM battery like the ones used for electric chairs. With a solar panel setup it would last as long as I had it out there.

Thanks, I'm going to go ahead and order one.

The setup I have is on 3G and I can't get a signal at the property where I have my traps now.

I'm also curious as to why your system is consuming so much power. The way I set my system up the only power drain would be for the GSM switch. Does that 4G GSM switch use that much more power? The 3G one I have used would last 4 weeks on a 12v 12amp sealed AGM battery like the ones used for electric chairs. With a solar panel setup it would last as long as I had it out there. [/quote]

You know, I am not really sure. the solar panel was in a shady spot initially, sort of just threw it up there. We were running just a regular old 12v battery we had as a spare for a feeder, so it could have been a bad battery. We just hooked an old tractor battery to it and it seems to be fine so far. Our trigger mechanism is probably a bit complicated, we have a pin that has a cable on one end, with some sort of motor that just pulls the cable until the pin is free of the gate, so that could be causing some extra power usage. My FIL is an electrician, so I just let him handle all the wiring aspect of it.

Good work guys!

And honestly....the younger pigs are the best ones you can get.

1. They aren't of breeding age yet.
2. They haven't had time to destroy as much property as older pigs.
3. They are normally easier to catch (greedy feeders and not yet trap shy).
4. They make the best eating...if you are so inclined.


Excellent catch!

Yes, good work! *4 They are definitely the best eating.