Scout Off Grid: Designing and Building a Dog Tracker

No Cell. No Sub. No Limits.

A GPS collar and handheld receiver that talk over radio. No cell towers and no monthly bill.

Why I Built It Myself

My dog Scout has been a great friend, how could I not name it after him? We spend a lot of time in places where the phone shows no bars, and that is exactly where every tracker I looked at stopped being useful. The few products that worked off-grid wanted a monthly subscription for it. I am a designer, not an electrical engineer, but I have spent years making things look like they work. I wanted to find out if I could make something that actually did. So I built my own: a collar and a handheld receiver that talk to each other over long-range radio, with no cell tower and no bill in between. I treated it the way I would treat a client launch. That meant a brand, a website, and a product, all designed by the same person and held to the same rules.

My Role

Brand, Web, Product & Hardware Design

Timeline

April 2026 – Present

Stage

Working prototype

Team

Just me (and Scout)

Designing the Thing on His Neck

The first version was a tangle of jumper wires on a breadboard. It found Scout, which was the only thing it needed to do. From there it moved to a hand-soldered perfboard, then to circuit boards I laid out in EasyEDA and had fabricated, with the collar and handheld boards bundled into one order. The enclosures are my own design in Fusion 360, printed in flexible TPU on my own printer so they can take a dog running through brush and still flex back into shape. This is where being a designer turned out to matter most. It is easy to judge a board by what fits on it. I kept asking what it would feel like on Scout’s neck. On one early build, half an inch of foam between the battery and the board was adding more height than any single component. Chasing that kind of problem out of the design was closer to product design than electrical work, and it is the part I enjoyed most.

Breadboard to Collar

The Website: ScoutGPSTracker.com

scoutgpstracker.com had one job: find out whether anyone besides me wanted this. I designed and built it as a single landing page with a waitlist. The page leads with the problem, not the parts list, because campers and hunters do not shop by radio frequency. They shop by whether it will work where they are going. The page speaks to off-grid campers first, then hunters, then hikers, in that order. Every rule from the guidelines holds on the page, and the only orange anywhere on it is the waitlist button. Each signup told me something I could not learn at a workbench.

Visit scoutgpstracker.com

The Specs

For anyone who wants what is under the TPU.

Microcontroller

Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3

Radio

LoRa, 915 MHz (Ebyte E22)

GPS

u-blox NEO-6M

Range

Up to 1 mile

Handheld Display

2.7" screen

Service Required

None. No cell, no subscription

Power

Rechargeable LiPo

Enclosure

3D-printed TPU, fits a 1" collar

Tools

EasyEDA, Fusion 360, OrcaSlicer, Arduino

What It Proved

Scout is not headed for a store shelf. It was always about finding out whether the way I think about brands and interfaces holds up when the product is real, runs on a battery, and has to survive a dog.

I spoke with engineers, toured a local manufacturer and built a working prototype, a great feeling. But when the rubber hit the road, the product wasn't going to be viable to move forward for sale. There are a lot of parts to bringing a product to market and this was a great learning curve for my first build.