Joost

One thing worth doing whichever you buy, and it costs nothing.

Test it before you need it. Give the tag to somebody, have them hide it in a neighbour's garden or a shed with the door shut, and go and find it. You will learn more in twenty minutes than from any review: how the app behaves when the signal is poor, how close you have to get, whether the interface is usable one-handed in the dark, and whether the thing you assumed would work actually does through a brick wall.

The two failure modes people discover at the worst possible moment are that the app needs a login they have forgotten, and that the last known position is a place the cat obviously is not any more. Both are much less alarming when you have already seen them on a Sunday afternoon.

And the boring thing that still finds more cats than any of this: a microchip that is registered to your current phone number. It costs nothing to check and it is out of date far more often than people think.

The reviews contradict each other because two completely different products are sold under the same words, and the listing rarely says which one you are buying.

Radio direction finders. A small tag and a handheld receiver you carry. No network, no subscription. The handset tells you a direction and a rough strength, and you walk until it gets stronger. Tiny, very light, battery measured in months.

Cellular trackers. A device with its own mobile connection that reports a position to an app. This is the one that shows a dot on a map, and it is the one that needs a subscription, because you are paying for a SIM. Heavier, and battery measured in days.

Now your first question answers itself, and the answer is the opposite of what the marketing implies. For actually finding a cat that has not come home, the radio one is usually better. A map dot puts you within a rough radius of where the device was when it last had signal - and a stuck or hiding cat is typically under a shed, in a garage, or somewhere that radius is fifty metres of dense back gardens you cannot walk into. You end up standing in a lane looking at a dot. The direction finder keeps working at exactly that point, gets stronger as you close in, and does not care about signal.

Where the cellular one wins is the other question: where does she go, over weeks. History, ranges, which gardens, whether she is being fed three streets away. That is genuinely interesting and it is a different purchase.

I ended up with one of each and the honest split is: the radio tag lives on the collar permanently, the cellular one comes out when I want the data.