Tabcat V2 Cat & Kitten Tracker - More Accurate Than GPS - No Monthly Fee or Subscription - Includes 2 Homing Tags - Up to 500ft Range - Small & Lightweight Tags Perfect to Find Indoor & Outdoor Cats

I admit it -- I did not have a lot of confidence this device would find my cat -- but it does. Last night it found her in complete darkness four houses away with no trouble.Pluses:- The tag is small and doesn't bother my smallish 10-lb cat. The batteries last a long time.- The tag has a flashing LED light when the cat is being searched for, although good luck seeing it unless the cat is turned in exactly the right direction.- The tag beeps softly when you are searching for the cat (this is more for the cat than for you, I suspect) while the hand-held sensor has three sound levels - off, low and high.- When any of the the lights on the handheld indicator come on you know the cat is near (150 feet or so) and when they increase you know you are getting closer together. When it changes from red to yellow to green you know your cat is within a few feet. It is very intuitive to use. Any yellow light means your cat is imminently findable.- after a couple of weeks the cat has figured out I am looking for her when her collar softly beeps and comes to me.Negatives:- It is sometimes a little difficult to tell which direction to go in to find your cat at first, but this works itself out as you move.- There is some light bleed from the power light to the first indicator light which makes it a bit hard to interpret if the cat has been detected or not.In summary, I really like this cat finder. It gives me peace of mind when the cat decides to go off on her own and I do not know where she is. I recommend this. If I were to lose it tomorrow I would buy another.Note: I've had this about a week and I have found that one of the most useful features is simply the ability to tell if your cat is near or far, without actually needing to track it down. If you turn it on and you see more than one or two lights, your cat is within about 150 feet. Any yellow lights at all and it is really close. I use that feature to just check at the door to make sure my cat is near the house.UPDATE: Five months in and I still love this device. If I lost it I would buy another immediately.Update 2 - one year in: OMG I LOVE this thing. It gives me so much peace of mind when my cat is outside. She has learned to come when her tag starts beeping. Even if only one light is activated on the handheld tracker I know she is somewhere near and I don't actually have to track her down. She often just comes home when she hears her collar beeping.PRO TIP: If you are trying to locate your dark gray cat in the dark and it is standing right next to you the Tabcat will not find it. The cat has to be a few feet away. Do not ask how I know this. lol.

This cat tracking option may not be for everyone, but it's exactly what I needed! You basically have 3 options for tracking cats...GPS tracking which requires a subscription, Airtags which require constant wifi access, or radio frequency options like this Tabcat system.I did not want any subscriptions and wifi dependency is not an option for me.This is awesome! I simply make sure my cat has his collar on prior to letting him outside. When I wabt to find him, I stand in my driveway and turn a,slow circle while pushing the button on the transmitter. When I'm in line with the receiver on his collar, the transmitter beeps and lights up. When I walk in the correct direction, the beeps get increasingly faster and more lights actively light up. The only downside is that the receivers and the transmitter require button cell batteries. But the battery life hasn't been an issue for me.There is no collar included but the receivers slip onto any standard cat collar.Note: I DO NOT recommend purchasing a used set to save a few bucks. I tried that and it was a disaster as the components clearly were not inspected thoroughly when returned by the previous customer. The receivers would not link to/communicate with the transmitter and one receiver even had corroded batteries in it.

I have a cat that wanders. I try and keep him in at night but if the weather is good he goes on walkabout. He can get back into the garage through a cat door but as we live in a rural area I'd just rather he be indoors with us for his own safety. If you've done your due diligence on cat trackers, you know there are 3 types. The Apple Airtags are cheap and show up on your phone, but they use Bluetooth and have a very short range. If you live out in the sticks like me, they are almost useless since there won't be a large network of iPhones to pick up the signal and share it to your phone. Then there are the GPS trackers. They'll give you a precise location of your cat right on your screen. The trouble is...they're expensive with a monthly fee (they use a cell phone network to track the transmitter so it's like getting your cat a mobile phone account), they're relatively heavy on you cat's neck, and the battery needs recharging like every day or so. Which brings us to the third type, a beacon tracker which is what the TabCat is. No monthly subscription, light weight, and the batteries last a reasonable length of time. The trouble is the range, which I have found is about 500ft. The cat collar tag is a miniature beacon. It is always listening but only transmits when it hears an interrogation signal from the handheld unit which you are holding. (If the tag was transmitting all the time the little hearing aid batteries in it would be dead in a matter of days, since transmitting requires far more power than receiving.) So, when you go looking for kitty you turn on your handheld unit, which is about the size of a credit card. It sends out an interrogation signal. If the cat's tag is in range it will respond with pings that your handheld unit picks up. The handheld unit has a highly directional antenna inside it. Swing it around and a series of eight LEDs light up based on how strong the received signal is from the tag. When you aim it for the strongest signal, that is the direction towards the cat. It's a lot like those police movies from the 1960s where they are tracking a car with a direction finding radio. Unless you cat is very close by, you are going to be hiking around a lot. Twice now I've ended up nearly half a mile from my house looking for the cat. And found him. It's a bit of a skill. I ended up walking for half an hour in various directions until I finally got a weak hit. Then a lot of moving left and right and seeing how the direction changed. Eventually I got close enough for a strong signal, whistled a couple of times and up popped Sherman, no doubt wondering, "What are YOU doing here?"Since I'm a bit of a radio geek I can live with the efforts involved. I did contact the TabCat folks and they told me it is using 2.45GHz microwave frequency. Which explains how they can get such an accurate directional antenna in the small handheld unit, since this is a very short wavelength. I did try an experiment by mounting the handheld unit at the focal point of a small microwave antenna dish of 14" diameter. It did increase the range a bit but it is pretty impractical tromping through the woods carrying a dish antenna. So far the battery life has been decent; I'm still on the original tab and handheld batteries. You can buy a dozen or more replacement batteries on Amazon for just a few dollars; these are fairly common button batteries. The instruction book tells you the type. A minor annoyance is that the handheld unit times out after about a minute so you have to press the keys again to restart it. But I know they have to do this because of the limited battery capacity. If you left it on constantly transmitting it would probably blow through the battery in short time. The tag you attach to your cat is very light weight. My cat has worn a breakaway cat collar for years so adding the tag to it didn't bother him a bit.All in all, if you worry about your cat's location, this unit does indeed work. But it will require some effort on your part too, chasing him down. Some people get the mistaken impression this is going to somehow show up on your phone's screen with an X marks the spot. It doesn't. It has nothing to do with your phone. You will be searching for the strongest signal on the handheld unit and it will involve a degree of exercise. But...better than having to walk a dog multiple times a day, right?