Numerous GPS devices have been released for dogs, and here's the next one, called RoamEO, letting you find that little lost sheep when he's gone astray. This is a fairly simple-looking device, which shows you location, heading and speed, showing you its helpful info on a color LCD screen. You can set it to sound an alarm if your doggie goes outside a certain defined perimeter, and it can track up to three pets at the same time as long as they're within a mile of the receiver.
This isn't the first dog GPS we've seen; we told you about one way back in 2003, the Secom GPS from Japan, and recently we pointed out the Global Pet Finder, a $349 device. These things have even gone pro, with the GPS Pro (what, a professional dog?). But none are as expensive as this RoamEO, depleting your finances by $459, and another $149 for each additional collar. Ships next month.
Product Page [White Bear Technologies, via The Raw Feed]
DISCUSSION
The RoamEO site doesn't mention how big the transmitter module is, so I'm guessing pretty darn big. That seems to be the case for all of these things; it's fine if you want to track a Labrador, not so great if you want to track a Pomeranian. The intended purpose of these systems is to track large-ish dogs in the great outdoors, though; the banner on the RoamEO site shows crunchy-granola hiking types, but I think the main market is actually the owners of hunting dogs.
Steve Wozniak's now-defunct Wheels of Zeus outfit promised to make a tracker system with tiny, lightweight transmitters. This could be why they're defunct :-).
For people who just want to know where the heck their cat is so they can drag it inside before the sun goes down, a simple direction-finder setup with pretty lousy range would probably be adequate - like those old-style nature-documentary wild animal locator systems using directional antennas, only smaller. A transmitter module with only a few days of rechargeable battery life would be fine; just take the cat's collar off while it's indoors for recharging (or unclip the transmitter by itself, leaving the collar on). A calculator-type solar panel on the collar could be enough to keep a simple bleeper running, too.
This sort of system would also be adequate for finding kids. It's not as if a fancy GPS system would work if your kid's wandered off inside a shopping mall, anyway.
I don't think any such product actually exists yet, though.