Garmin Astro 220 DC-30 GPS 6-Dog Tracking Combo

Tired of searching for your hunting dog in tall grass or dense cover? Now you can leave the hunting entirely to him....

Introducing Astro, the first high-sensitivity GPS-enabled dog tracking system for hunters and sportsmen. This unique system pinpoints your dog’s position and shows you exactly where he is, even when you can’t see or hear him.

Attach Collar and Go
The Astro system includes a bright color-screen handheld GPS device and the rugged, all-weather DC-30 collar.

The collar has an integrated GPS transmitter and is specially weighted so the antenna will always point to the sky for optimum signal. To get started, just take Astro outdoors and turn on the handheld and transmitter to acquire GPS satellite signals. Then attach the DC-30 to your dog. Now you’re ready to turn him loose — no other setup required.

Track Dogs in Dense Cover
As often as every five seconds, your dog’s DC-30 transmits his position to your handheld. And you can see his current location and a trail of where he’s been on the Map page of your handheld. Switch over to the "Dog Tracker" page to view a compass pointing to your dog’s location as well as his current status: whether he’s running, sitting, on point or treeing quarry.

How the update rate to the DC-30 collar is changed which will increase the DC-30 collar battery life from 17 hours to up to 36 hours (not written in the DC-30 manual so we will include it here):

Hit the Dog button, then the Menu button, then where is says "show info" on that screen hit Ent (enter).which gets you to the dog info screen. From there you hit Menu and scroll down to Change Comm Settings and hit Ent and it asks you to choose an available ID and you can just select OK and hit enter if you have no issues with other nearby Garmin collars. Then it asks you to set the position update rate and highlight the seconds and hit Ent and you can choose either 5, 10, or 30 seconds, hit Ent, select OK on the lower part of the screen and hit Ent and then select OK again by hitting Ent and you are up and running at your selected update rate.

The 5 second rate will be the one that lasts 17 hours but it also gives a more precise tracking record as it tracks your dog every 5 seconds, whereas if you change it to 30 seconds, it will last a lot longer (up to 36 hours on a full charge) but it only updates every 30 seconds so not as much fine tracking detail but if you are more interested in a long tracking time, the small tracking moment by moment details would not be an issue so yes you can get a lot more battery life out of the collar if you change it to an update rate of 30 seconds.

Instructions for changing the frequency that your DC-30 collar is being received from to increase your range and signal clarity (Also not written in the DC-30 manual so we will include it here):

Press the "Dog" button then press the "menu" buttonscroll down to select "Dog List" and hit the "ENT" button. Scroll down the list and pick which transmitter you need to change the frequency on and hit the "ENT" button and select the "show info" option and hit the "ENT" button. Now hit the "Menu" button and scroll down to "Change Comm Settings" and hit the "ENT" button. Use the scroll button to highlight the "Available ID" number and hit the "ENT" button. Now you can scroll up or down the number list from 0 to 49 (Each number is a different frequency. Check to see what frequencies your other collars are on by using these instructions and choose a frequency that the other collars are not on)

In the Box