gps dog collar?

hey from kentucky,
(I would ask around here if there were more bird hunters lol)
My bird hunting partner supplies the dogs and I supply the land to chase quail and grouse. Normally we hunt rolling farmlands that are high up on plateaus and mountain tops and the garmin alpha dog collars do a great job. but today we were chasing grouse in a very deep rugged valley and the hillsides were straight up . at times the collars struggled to keep an accurate track on the dog but most points were spot on.
does anybody ever have this problem when hunting in rugged country?
what gps dog collars do you guys use?
thanks a bunch for any help

I had problems while hunting from a vehicle.

I use the Garmin Astro and only occasionally lose contact with the dogs. Of course our terrain here in OK is undoubtedly flatter than where you hunt in KY.

The collars communicate with the handheld via radio and are thus somewhat dependent upon line of sight. When I do lose contact I head towards the nearest hilltop. With a 7 mile range on the handheld you'd have to have a pretty big running dog to lose them entirely assuming you can get high enough to get LOS contact somewhere inside that 7 mile radius.

thanks for the info. if we were just sticking to quail it wouldn't be an issue but this grouse game is in some pretty rough country and its dang near impossible to go looking for a dog in this terrain. I'm not sure there is a good solution it may just be part of the day dealing with this country

Remember that the GPS needs Line of Sight to multiple satellites to give a positions.
GPS satellites have week signals to begin with, so tree cover can block the signal enough that it is spotty.


When you or the dog get close to the bottom hill, gully, or similar feature, if the earth can easily block the LOS to multiple satellites.


The US constellation should always give you a view of at least 4 satellites. You can enable both the US GPS and Russians GLONASS at the same time. Due to the way the orbits work, a certain spot on the back side of a hill could have a great GPS signal at one time, then not work later in the same day. Enabling both the GPS and GLONASS can increase your chances of having a fix in rugged terrain\tree cover.

There is a screen buried somewhere on the Alpha 100 that will show you how many satellites and how strong of signal you have at any given time.

Thanks NAK, this is a very good explanation of how this thing works. we will take a closer look at the device in the morning and make sure BOTH satellite search features are working. also I had never really given any thought to different times of day giving different signals due to changing satellite positions.
much appreciated

Personally, we've been using the Whistle Go Explore tracker for a while and haven't seen any problems with it. I've also been testing the connection of GPS satellites with my phone recently (via Google Maps) and always show up spot on even with a lot of tree coverage in the way. So the connection strength itself is fine. A bigger problem, which is easily overlooked, is that water absorbs microwaves (that's why microwave ovens work) so if you have too much cloud cover, signals get absorbed and won't get through (both ways). I try to stay away from cloudy weather situations these days.