Petronix Wear Combines BLE, LTE, GPS, and NTN to Give Pet Owners Peace of Mind
The Challenge:
Traditional tracking collars are helpful for finding lost pets, but they can’t prevent them from getting lost in the first place. That’s a big drawback, especially for people who give their dogs the freedom to roam off leash on hikes and hunts. They also can’t help prevent injury and death because they can’t alert owners when their dog is approaching a deep ravine or a mountain lion.
“Off-leash dogs are constantly making decisions their owners cannot see, and existing technology does almost nothing to help,” says Brent Halverson, Founder of Petronix and an electrical engineer who’s experienced all that with his own dog, Molly. “Most owners turn to GPS trackers, but they only tell you where your dog was after something already went wrong. There is nothing out there that actively helps prevent the dozens of situations that can turn dangerous before a dog ever goes missing.”
Traditional tracking collars also struggle to report the dog’s location. One reason is that dense foliage frequently blocks the collar’s view of GPS satellites or attenuates their already weak signals. Another challenge is that cellular coverage often is spotty or unavailable in forests and remote hiking trails. So even when the collar can use GPS to pinpoint the dog’s location, it can’t use cellular to share that information with the owner.
Halverson founded Petronix Wear to create a pet tracker capable of overcoming all of those challenges.
“The product needed to handle a wide range of real-time safety functions: monitoring the dog’s behaviour and surrounding environment in real time to detect changes that precede dangerous situations, hazard detection, geofence guidance, and lost dog recovery,” he says. “Once we mapped out everything the product needed to do, one thing became clear. All of it fails if the RF fails. A product that goes dark in a forest is worse than useless for a safety application. So we made a deliberate call early: get the RF right first and build everything else on top of that foundation.”
The Solution:
To get the RF right, Halverson turned to Taoglas for antennas capable of supporting a mix of short- and long-range technologies: Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE), LTE, GPS, and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN). This unique combination provides redundancy and resiliency — and peace of mind for pet owners — because if one technology isn’t available, another probably is. (For a deeper dive, see “The Sky is the Limit: Combining Cellular, GNSS, and NTN for Seamless Global Connectivity, Positioning, and More.”)
“Taoglas brings both the products and the engineering support to solve hard RF problems,” Halverson says. “Their evaluation board ecosystem is thorough and well-documented. The level of documentation on boards and antennas helped us move efficiently through what was an extensive prototyping process. We tested multiple boards across multiple antenna configurations and evaluated different antenna lengths and component combinations within our target footprint. The availability of custom coax cables directly from Taoglas supported our prototyping process throughout.”
Petronix Wear also was one of the first customers to use the new Taoglas Antenna Integrator design tool, which significantly reduces development time to get new products to market faster.
“The Antenna Integrator tool arrived at a critical moment,” Halverson says. “We were deep into prototyping with multiple hardware configurations in hand, evaluating LTE protocol variants including CAT 1, CAT 1 bis, and CAT-M alongside NTN. The tool gave us the performance data we needed on Return Loss, VSWR, Efficiency, Average Gain, and Isolation to make final decisions on both our antenna and module selection with confidence. It saved us board turns and accelerated our path to final design.”
The Outcome:
Petronix Wear’s initial product is the Trail Edition harness, which supports a wider range of applications than traditional tracking collars.
“The Petronix Wear Trail Edition is an intelligent dog safety platform that tracks, protects, and guides dogs anywhere,” Halverson says. “It includes real-time GPS tracking with LTE connectivity that seamlessly falls back to NTN when cell service is unavailable. The harness monitors behavior and environment in real time, and when a dog moves toward a hazard such as a cliff edge, a wildlife encounter, or an approaching hiker, it delivers real-time feedback to both the dog and owner to redirect and alert before the situation escalates.”
Lost Dog Mode is another example of Petronix Wear Trail Edition’s proactive features.
“When a dog wanders beyond a set boundary, Lost Dog Mode activates,” Halverson says. “Satellite pings, BLE broadcasts, and the harness speaker – which announces the dog is lost to anyone nearby, no app or technology required on their end – work together to help other trail users assist in recovery, even without owner action.”