Quote Originally Posted by goshawkr View Post
I was giving this new device some thought Sunday evening. As I have mentioned, this is a device built for longwingers. Everything about it is currently targeted at what they need. Which is fine of course....

As a die hard austringer, I do at times need to track my bird down from distances over a mile, but I can only recall once having to do that in the 18 years I have been flying goshawks.

The vast majority of the time I am trying to find out what @#$%^$%$!! bush my hawk has snuck under with its catch. And where I live and primarily hunt, the ground cover can be very thick for acres and acres. It makes for a real challenge tracking down a hawk when you have to beat the brush down just to spin a circle and refresh your bearing. In these situations, I can see a lot of advantages to this system when a shortwinger version (insert my assertion that longer battery life is needed to meet shortwinger needs here....) comes online.

Anyway, off to my question - what is the accuracy of the location? GPS is only accurate to within 100', and that can leave you a big area of brush to look under. There several correction systems that refine the GPS error rate to something much more reasonable for a "find my hiding hawk" application. Does the new Marshall GPS unit implement any of those? How big of an area is the "your hawk is here" circle?

Thankfully, the attenuator on my Field Marshall lets me get a directional signal from just a few feet away. Unforunately, because I very rarely need to use it (3 in the past 10 years) I am too stupid to remember that the range is measure in inches and not yards when I am using the near setting and I keep overshooting my target.
Hi Geoff,

a couple of examples.

Firstly in Scotland, testing the transmitter by attaching it to the collar of my pointer.
As she quartered the soaked moorland, I watched the arrow on my iphone pointing at her. Left, right, left. Then, as she crossed ahead of me and continued to the right, the system went wrong and the arrow remained pointing to the left.
Of course, the system hadn't gone wrong. The transmitter had fallen off her collar, and I was panicking.
It couldn't have been easier. I simply walked in the direction of the arrow until (from memory) 440 feet became 0. I looked down and there it was.

At the weekend I had a similar thing, except the transmitter was attached to my falcon, who was attached to a partridge about 700 feet away in a huge field of sugar beet.
In pre-telemetry days it would be a big problem, and even using good telemetry it can be a little problematic. With this, it simply couldn't have been easier.

Because of the excitement surrounding some of the very cool things GPS makes available, these most basic things can be easily overlooked.
For me, it's one of the most exciting developments ever.

Best wishes,

Tony.