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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Initial review- great product
By BrdHntr
I've had the Alpha for about a week now, been out 4 times with it. Initially I like the unit. I had a tritronics G2 Upland exp with a beeper and liked it but in the thick woods especally hunting grouse there were quite a few times I lost track of my dog for awhile, she can get out of hearing range very quickly. I like the peace of mind I get from the Alpha knowing where the dog is and I can actually leave the dog hunt better rather than calling her back so I know where she is. I havn't got used to holding the handheld unit yet to see where the dog has gone. Everything has worked as advertised so far with no problems.That being said there are a few things I would change. One thing is the dog alerts I have setup to tell me when she,s on point. It takes about 15 seconds after she goes on point before I get an alert, and I only get one alert no matter how long she is on point. I guess I kind of miss the beeper with my old unit although it could be annoying when she was hunting close. I don't like the charging adapter for the TT 10 collar, sometimes it doesn't make contact until you wiggle it a little- it could of been designed better especially for the price of the unit. Garmin is a good name and I have 2 other gps units by garmin and I like them but thier website sucks, it freezes, is hard to navigate. Tritronics, IMHO is the best name in the dog traning arena and these 2 companys worked together on this unit. I got this unit on a 30 day trial bases, at this time I am probably going to keep the unit. This does so many things that I havn't figured out yet. I thought the long antenna on the collar may be restrictive for the dog but she doesn't seem to mind it too much, I saw her once or twice biting at it when it would touch her side, but that was in the first hour of wearing it since then she seems ok with it. They claim 9 mile range with this unit but here in cental PA I don't think it will go quite that far, I had my wife jump in the car and go for a drive with the collar, she got about 4 miles away and dropped down into a deeper small hollow and I lost track of her on the map screen but I could still operate the training portion of the collar and when she came out of the hollow I picked her up again on the map, The fartherst she went was about 5 miles, pretty impressive to me. I intend on returning and updating this review after I have had the unit for awhile. This is a little on the pricey side but we all love our dogs so much it gives you peace of mind. I only have 1 dog but I can see the value in this unit if you run a pack of hunting dogs together this unit would be worth every dime. UPDATE-11/23/2012- I've been out about 20 times now and I LOVE this collar, I miss that anoying beeper less and less. The battery life is great, the gps tracking dead on, and now I can find my truck everytime too. I have not had any problems with the unit at all although I dread trying to use Garmins website for updates, I constantly have problems with thier website.If you can afford it and love your dogs I would highly recommend purchasing this unit. UPDATE- 2/20/2013- Hunting season is over here. I have had an issue twice with this unit. The collar would just turn itself off, this happened only twice to me. I started researching and found on Tri-tronics forum it was happening to others too but only occasionally, then about a month ago Garmin answered a question I sent to support about the issue saying that if you wear a second collar on the dog behind the Alpha 100 and the metal part of the collar touches the charging terminals it will shut down the unit. They reccommend either wearing the second collar in front of the Alpha or put electrical tape across the charging terminals. This has only happened to me twice and I havn't changed anything about the way I wear it on my dog. I still think it is a great unit, but as I said before they could have done a better job on the charging terminals.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Great Unit.
By Jim
I love this collar! Have had it for about 2 months and have been been using it 6 days a week on a the disk golf course I play on with my dog so am getting pretty familiar with it. The more I use it the more I like it. I can hardly wait until Chukar season opens to test its full capabilities.
Pros- these are a few that come to mind
I can see the screen in bright sunlight AND I don't have to wear my 2X reading glasses. You can set the defaults to have Big text. Would not want to have reading glasses on when birds get up!
Touch screen is big improvement over Astro; more intuitive also.
I can "see" where dog is even when he would be beyond hearing range of a beeper.
No Beeper or Hawk whistle to have to try to hear!!
When dog is on point you know where he is! No more walking wrong directions before finally finding him.
No ½ mile (at best) range limit (like my old-fashioned G3).
A great full featured GPS besides being an all-in-one training/tracking collar
The tone on the dog collar; in just a couple sessions I trained my dog to come to it.
E-collar is the top of the line tri-tronics model.
Map capabilities are the best available from Garmin.
Nice to be able to download yours and dogs tracks and view on Garmin or Google earth ( I notice my dog travels 6-8 miles while I go 2).
Birdseye satellite images (you have to buy subscription) overlaid on free detailed topo maps (check online for free 1:24000 maps) are awesome.
Cons
Nothing of big concern I can think of ...is a bit of a learning curve but with so many features that's to be expected.
Need a better connection for the collar charger. I agree with others that the clip would be easy to lose (I bought an extra just in case).
A couple suggestions for a firmware update are:
1. A "one dog" mode; no need to "select" a dog when there is only one on the list to select from. Not a biggie but would save a couple keystrokes in getting to the dog info.
2. Would help to have more ring tones so you could have a different tone for each alert type.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Good everywhere but garages
By Shemp
I bought this system with two collars after one of the dogs followed the neighbor's dog up to the interstate. I set it to alarm when the dogs exit a geofence (configurable perimeter in the handheld) about 100 yards from the house. It has worked very well over the past few months and my two dogs are now trained to stay within 100 yards of the house. The collars and receiver have been out in freezing temperatures, snow, rain, and even spent a week in the desert heat. Reliability of the hardware has been excellent. In open space these units have great radio range. In dense, hilly forest the practical range varies from 300 - 600 yards.
Only four starts because I have one gripe: When the dogs go into the garage to take a nap, the collars lose GPS reception. And later, the system will randomly report that they are 100+ yards away and moving fast. When I go outside to call them back, they come out of the garage wondering what all the fuss is about. This is very broken and it would be great if Garmin could fix this in the system logic or perhaps by selling a radio beacon that could be placed in the garage (and could inform the collars where they are since they cant see the GPS satellites).
One last comment: The collars feature LED lights to help you spot the dog at night, but these lights are aimed parallel with the dog's neck rather than outward or radially. So they are not visible unless your dog has extremely short fur.
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