Finally got a garmin.... WOW!!!

[Hunter]

I got my garmin and 2 collars and all I can say is HOLY SH*T BALLS..... This thing is AWESOME!!!! It's like a whole different world. I turned out on a rig and tracked my dogs turn for turn while setting on a stump. They went 257 yards from me (at that point) and set down to treeing or so the garmin said. I couldn't hear them because the wind was pretty strong so I turned my tracker on and was getting a sporatic tree beep. I had my doubts about it but, I went anyways(not like it was that far to begin with). I started hearing them and they were treeing hard. I got to the tree and there was a nice big ole boar bear. I praised up the dogs and the bear looked comfy so I started digging in my pack for my camera when the dogs went ballistic. He came down and left out in a hurry once the ivory started to stinging him. I kept tracking and following them. I wanted to see how good this thing was. I was at about 2300 feet in elevation when I stopped and could track them all the way down in the hollows to about 1500 feet on my side. Once they hit the bottom that "deep" and started up I would pick them back up. This went on until they hit about a .75 miles. (I logged it down on a card) Once they got out that far it went down to around 1800 feet and that was both sides of the hollow. When they got to 1.25 miles I was only picking them up when they hit 2000 feet or topping over the ridges. The last signal was at 3.25 miles when they topped over a ridge. I started walking towards them then. I guess I should have followed closer but, there was a deep (1200ft) wide hollow between them and myself and I wouldn't have been able to "test" it from down there. They treed it 3 more times according to the track log on the collars. I finally caught them off the last tree 13 hours later. If I'm reading the info on the map source right they covered 14.8 miles at an average of 2 mph when I turned their collars off when I leashed them up. I lost two dogs with beep beeps on when they split, I guess they fell behind and got lost or got on another bear anyways I picked them up 2 days later. The Garmin is awesome and I'm saving my pennies to outfit all my dogs.

[ferjr]

they do work great. i wouldnt be hunting if i had to only rely on my f&l box. you can see exsactly what your dogs are doing, which dogs that are worth keeping and which ones that need to be culled. it is a lie detector for dogs. people that dont use one have know idea what there dogs are really doing, they just know when they get to the tree. the garmin will show you which dog out of the pack is the fastest and what the rest of the pack is doing at all times.