Manual

01

What you need

Three things. That is the whole list.

• The collar with the tracker — IK122T or IK122T Pro.
• A SIM card that goes into the collar. Any carrier, the cheapest plan they sell. The collar sends tiny packets, it is not streaming video. But two things must be right, or the collar will never report: the card needs mobile data (calls and SMS alone are not enough) and the PIN must be disabled. The collar has no keypad to enter one. Turn the PIN off by putting the card in a phone first (Settings → Security → SIM lock), then move it to the collar.
• An Android phone with the DogTracker app. There is no iPhone version, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The collar does not talk to your phone directly. It reports its position over its own SIM to our server, and the app reads it from there. So both of you need signal — if you are the one standing in a dead spot, your map sits still until you climb out of it.

02

Setting up and pairing the collar

Do this at home, unhurried, the day before you go out. Not at five in the morning in a car park.

1. Create an account. Name, email, a password of at least 8 characters. A confirmation link arrives by email — click it right away while you are still at the phone.
2. Enter your own phone number as the Admin/SOS number. It is optional, but do it now. It applies to every collar you own, and each new one picks it up on its own as soon as it pairs.
3. Test the card in your phone before it goes into the collar. Put it in, open any page to confirm data works, then disable the PIN. Two minutes here save an hour of guessing later — a collar that "will not report" has a locked card or a card without data nine times out of ten.
4. Put the SIM card in the collar and switch it on. Leave it outside with a clear view of the sky — indoors it can hunt for satellites for a long while.
5. Open Trackers → Add tracker and type in the collar's number. That is the 11-digit number printed on the device itself, not the SIM number.
6. Add the number of the SIM card inside the collar too. Not required, but if you fill it in, the next step is one tap instead of copying a number across by hand.
7. Send the prepared SMS. The app writes the message for you — you just send it to the SIM number in the collar. Nothing to type, nothing to edit in the text.
8. Wait a minute or two. The collar reports to the server and attaches itself to your account — the entry disappears from "Pending requests". There is nothing else for you to do.
9. Assign a dog to the collar — name, breed, photo. The photo is not decoration: when three dogs are running across your map, you will pick them apart by face faster than by name.

That SMS is sent once, when you first pair the collar. After that the collar reports on its own, over the internet.

03

Reading the map

The map opens first. It is satellite imagery, so you see the actual woods, clearings and tracks — not just lines. If a plain street map suits you better somewhere, switch the layer.

Tap a dog and you get what the collar is reporting:

• Speed — tells you at a glance whether the dog is working or standing still.
• Heading — which way it is going. Plus the bearing and distance from you to the dog, so you know where to move.
• Collar battery.
• Satellite count — how many the collar has right now. Few satellites means a weaker fix; in thick cover or under a rock face that is normal.
• How old the reading is — "just now", "2 min ago" and so on. Check this one first.

The dot on the map is the last position the collar sent, not where the dog is this second. At rest the collar reports less often, so the dot can be a few minutes old. That is exactly why the age of the reading sits next to every dog.

04

LIVE — when to use it

LIVE means one thing: the collar reports every 5 seconds. The dot moves while you watch it.

Turn it on when the dog is working, when you are trying to catch up to it, when you need to know which side it went round. Leave it off on the walk in, while you are sitting at a stand, and while the dog is lying next to you. Five-second updates buy you nothing there and cost you battery.

LIVE switches itself off:

• after 30 minutes, and
• sooner than that if the collar goes 15 minutes without reporting — it has dropped into a dead spot or shut down.

That shut-off is not a fault, it is battery protection — otherwise the collar would sit at 5-second updates all day and go flat halfway through. Still need it? Turn it back on, one tap.

05

Hunting with a group

When there are five of you and everyone has a dog out, there is no sense in each man watching only his own.

1. Open Hunt → New hunt, give it a name and add your dogs.
2. Invite the others by email — the address they registered with. Without a DogTracker account there is nowhere for the invitation to land.
3. Once they accept, everyone sees every dog in the hunt on one map. Theirs on yours, yours on theirs.

Your own position is never shared automatically. The "Share my location" switch stays off until you turn it on — when you create a hunt, when you accept an invitation, or later in the "Hunters" tab. Turn it off whenever you like. The dogs are always visible; the hunters only if they choose to be.

06

Movement history

The History tab: pick a dog and a day and see where it went. The track can be replayed like a recording, start to finish.

It earns its keep in the evening, once you sit down: where the dog picked up the scent, where it circled, which way it came out, where you lost sight of it. Next time you know where to wait.

Positions are kept for 60 days and deleted in monthly blocks, no later than 92 days after they were recorded — this is not a season archive. If a particular day matters to you, take a screenshot.

07

Collar commands

Commands open from the map — the remote-control button on the right edge. They apply to the dog selected in the header.

• Light — the lamp on the collar comes on. After dark a dog coming out of cover shows up as a moving light long before you hear it.
• Sound — the collar makes a noise. When you know the dog is close but cannot see it, your ears will find it before the map does.
• Training sound — a different tone from the find sound, for dogs trained to respond to it.
• Vibration — a short signal to the dog, for dogs trained to it. Only the IK122T Pro has it. If there is no vibration button in the app, your collar does not have it — nothing is broken.
• Electric impulse — only if your collar supports it. Use it on a dog trained for it; it is not a substitute for training and not a way to force a dog back. The app and the server limit it to 10 impulses per minute and 60 per hour, per collar — beyond that the command is refused. That limit is deliberate and cannot be switched off from the app.

A command does not go straight from your phone to the collar. It travels through the server and the mobile network, so it can take a second or two. If the collar is off the network the commands are greyed out: there is nobody to deliver them to until it reports again.

Device settings — below the commands, on the same screen:

• Location upload interval — how often the collar reports its position when LIVE is off. The default is 30 seconds. Reporting less often means longer battery but an older marker; more often, the other way round. LIVE overrides this temporarily (5 seconds) and restores it when it stops.
• Admin/SOS number — the phone number the collar keeps as its own. You set it, and change it, from the app.

08

Alerts and what they mean

The app tells you four things:

• Collar battery is low. This is the one you really do not want to miss in the middle of a drive.
• The collar went offline, or came back. "Went offline" usually just means the dog crossed into a patch with no coverage — wait for the message saying it is back.
• LIVE was stopped automatically. Either the 30 minutes ran out, or the collar dropped off the network.
• A hunt invitation from someone in your group.

Each one can be switched off on its own in Settings, so keep only what you want. If you have blocked notifications for the whole app in your phone's settings, the app will warn you about it — with them off you will not even hear that the battery is running out.

09

Battery and saving it

We are not going to give you a number of hours, because it honestly depends. On the collar model, on how often it reports, on how much LIVE you used, and most of all on signal: a collar fighting weak coverage all day drains noticeably faster than one sitting on full bars.

What actually helps:

• Leave the resting interval long (every 30 seconds, say). For the walk in, that is more than enough.
• Turn LIVE on when the action starts, not when you leave the house.
• Charge the collar the night before you go, not two days earlier.
• Keep a charger in the car. It has saved many an afternoon.

10

When something goes wrong