[gwoplock]

WiFi and LTE are too power intensive for a pet tracker in my opinion. Something like LoRaWAN would be ideal. In urban areas public LoRaWAN coverage already exists and where it doesn't the coverage of one gateway would likely be far greater than a cat's roaming range. Bandwidth shouldn't be an issue either as a GPS point (without elevation) would easily fit inside the smallest LoRa packet.

You'd be able to do the switch over from low frequency check-ins to high frequency with the RX slot that comes after a TX slot, but the only issue would be having to wait for a check-in before the realtime mode is activated. But with a sufficient, ~5 minute, low-frequency check-in period, I'd imagine that's a small inconvenience.

[deirdresm]

I've got a really wandery cat whose range is about 1-1.5km in any direction from the house. We try to keep her within 0.5km as much as possible. If we didn't manage her location fairly actively, she'd probably wander farther.