GPS trackers for Dalmatian and English Setter

A Dalmatian and an English Setter — both with strong hunting instincts and a habit of vanishing the moment they catch a scent. GPS trackers are genuinely well-suited to this situation, but they do need a mobile subscription to function and work best where there's decent network coverage. A couple of quick questions before I point you in the right direction: are both dogs microchipped, are you mostly in rural areas or a mix of town and countryside, and do you need two separate trackers or are you open to a single account that covers both?

Perfect — that's exactly the use case GPS trackers are built for. Woodland can be patchy for mobile signal, so the tracker's network matters a lot. How far do they typically get before you can call them back — are we talking a few hundred metres or genuinely out of sight for ten or twenty minutes?

Right, so real distance, real woodland, two dogs who mean business. For this I'd recommend the Tractive GPS DOG 4 — it's the most reliable option for rural UK use, runs on its own LTE network with good countryside coverage, and has a live tracking mode that updates every two to three seconds when you need it. The subscription is around £4–5 a month per tracker, so you'd need two units and two subscriptions, but the app handles both dogs in one place. The battery lasts two to five days depending on how much live tracking you use, which is realistic for daily woodland walks. It's also lightweight enough for both breeds — the Setter in particular doesn't need anything bulky around the neck.

Honestly, very dense woodland will always cause some lag — that's true of any LTE-based tracker, not just Tractive. In practice, most users find it updates frequently enough to follow a moving dog through trees, though you might get a five to ten second delay in the heaviest cover. The location history is continuous, so even if it stutters live, you can see the exact route your dog took. That's often more useful than people expect — if the Setter disappears and comes back muddy, you can actually retrace where she went. For woodland use it's as good as anything currently available in the UK.

A few things worth doing first: charge both trackers fully before you head out, download the Tractive app and activate each device with its own subscription, then set up safe zones for your home so you get an alert if either dog leaves the garden unexpectedly. It's also worth doing a quick test walk somewhere familiar so you can see how the live tracking feels in your local conditions before you rely on it in deep woodland. Once that's done, you're good to go — and having two dogs tracked on one app is genuinely reassuring once you're used to it.