Choya Wears An AirTag

It was tough to find a real-time GPS tracker. I wasn't confident that Tractive or Whistle will work in Singapore. The pricey monthly/annual subscription plan is a major put-off. I was willing to pay it, but their range doesn't seem to cover Singapore. There’s Tack, a homegrown brand offers a recently Kickstarter-funded similar product with an annual subscription at an affordable S$56.  

Choya's recall is dicey at best. I'll have to watch her mood to let her off-leash. But I generally don't; I use a long line. As small as Singapore is, dogs can still get loose and lost. If that ever happens to mine, I want to give her the best chances of surviving till I find her. Two years into having her, I finally seriously considered a tracker on a collar. I almost put an old Apple Watch on Choya, but it was too heavy. 

I was seriously considering a Tack, but hesitated about its 30-gram weight. The next best option- Apple's 11-gram AirTag. Well, I'm on this dark side and mired in the Apple ecosystem. Got the AirTags immediately on product launch day. I didn't need a pack of four. Two sufficed. Had one engraved, and left the other one blank. I wanted to stick stuff on it. Hahaha. The engraving only allowed for four letters or four limited emojis. So I made sure to include a poop emoji on that one. I have plenty of Shiba Inu stickers, so randomly stuck one on the other AirTag. 

Needed a sleeve + holder for the AirTags. Bought cheap silicone holders from Lazada. Those don't just protect the AirTag, they're fit it securely to the dog's collar. At S$2.50 each, I bought like 10 of them in two designs to try out. Hahaha. I didn't bother with leather. I don't particular fancy leather on an active dog. The key-ring types are fine, except that the dangling might irritate the dog. These cheap holders turned out to be practical and effective. 

The other silicone ones that flip open with the 'button' aren't that secure, but they have held up so far when the dog gets zoomies or when she rolls around in grass, sand and water. The most secure ones are those that simply slip in and out of the collar. Those won't come open easily and that would be used for school. The school doesn't need an additional headache to check on missing AirTags. It's the owners' responsibility to ensure that the gadgets are securely attached to the collars to begin with. 

I sent Choya to school with one AirTag. Kinda fun stalking her at school or when she heads out on pack walks. In the morning, I could see her bus route to pick up the other furries and when all of them get to school. In the afternoon, I could see her when she was on the move home. To be clear, it's not real-time tracking though; there's a lag of eight to ten minutes and it wouldn't work without iPhones (with Bluetooth turned on) nearby. 

I'm quite impressed that AirTag's bluetooth and ultrawideband (UWB) capabilities allow for some sort of real-time tracking, maybe to a distance of 10km if there're plenty of iPhones with bluetooth turned on and in range. We have sufficient iPhone users to make this useful in the event that Choya gets lost. When used in this manner, the AirTag is more useful than a standard lousy bluetooth tracker, but not as accurate as a GPS tracker. Apple has stressed that the AirTag is meant for locating items, not people or pets. But who cares. Something is better than nothing, till Apple releases an actual pet tracker.