Introducing The Maverick 1
The Maverick 1 clips onto the collar your dog already wears. It shows you where your dog is in real time, watches activity and sleep, and the battery lasts up to three months.
Open your phone and see your dog on a live map. The Maverick 1 reports real time location whether your dog is asleep on the porch or three fields away, and it keeps reporting far past the point where phone-based tags lose track. The tracking service is $5 a month with no annual contract.
Battery life is where tracking collars quietly fail. A tracker that dies in a day protects your dog on a schedule, and dogs do not get lost on a schedule. Years of work on low power design went into the Maverick 1, so the battery holds up to three months. Put it on and think about it again next season.
Beyond location, the Maverick 1 keeps a record of your dog's activity and sleep schedule. You see when the afternoon zoomies happened, whether the walk was long enough, and whether last night's sleep looked normal. Changes in a dog's routine are often the first sign something is off.
If your dog gets out, turn on emergency mode. The Maverick 1 flashes a bright LED, so a runaway dog is easier to spot in the dark and easier to pick out at a distance while you follow the live map to them.
Technology
The rest of this page skips the jargon on purpose. For those who want it, this is the engineering inside the Maverick 1.
A dedicated GPS receiver reports your dog's actual coordinates. The Maverick 1 does not guess the position from someone else's passing phone.
LoRaWAN is a low power radio protocol that can carry a location report for miles on a tiny amount of energy. It is how the tracker stays in touch far beyond WiFi and Bluetooth range.
When your dog is home, the tracker switches to the closest, cheapest link instead of long range radio. That choice is a big part of why the battery lasts as long as it does.
The hardware and firmware are designed and written in-house, not outsourced, and tuned around a single goal: months of battery life from a device small enough to ride on a collar.
Applications
The Maverick 1 is one product built on an in-house sensor platform: long range LoRaWAN radio, a power budget measured in months, and firmware written here. The same stack carries readings from anything that has to report in from a place with no power and no coverage nearby.
Soil moisture, soil temperature and field conditions reported from the middle of a field. One gateway at the barn covers the acreage around it, and the nodes run a season on a charge.
Nodes along a ridge or a property line watch for sudden jumps in temperature and CO2 and raise an alert while the fire is still small enough to matter.
The same hardware that finds a dog finds a herd. Track cattle across open range for months at a time, without pulling collars off every week to charge them.
Automated meter reads sent over long range radio. A utility stops paying someone to walk the route and gets a reading from the whole service area on a schedule.
Lights that dim on a schedule and report their own outages, so a city knows which pole needs a truck before a resident calls it in.
A sensor in the container reports how full it is. Routes get driven against real fill data instead of a fixed calendar, and the half empty stops get skipped.
Location and temperature logged together for the length of the trip, so a shipment that warmed up in transit is caught on arrival rather than after a complaint.
Vibration signatures from motors, pumps and conveyors, watched for the drift that tends to show up well before a bearing fails.
A sensor at the end of a long driveway, on a gate, or at a back fence that reaches the house on its own. No WiFi at the far end, no trenching, no repeater in between.
A sensor on the box out at the road reports the moment the door opens, so the walk down the driveway happens after the mail lands instead of before.
A crawlspace, a vacation house or an irrigation line that nobody visits gets checked by a sensor rather than by the next water bill. The node reports the moment something is wet.
Water wells, cisterns and propane tanks that report their own level from wherever they sit, with no power run and no data line trenched out to them.
Working on one of these? Write to maverick@mkn.us.
From the founder
“The Maverick 1 came out of years of R&D in long range RF over LoRaWAN and extreme low power design. I wrote and designed the hardware and the firmware personally. None of it was outsourced, and it is designed in America.”
Compare
The short version: nothing else pairs real time location with a battery measured in months at this price.
| Maverick 1 | Fi Series 3+ | Apple AirTag | Tractive | Halo Collar 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware | $99 | $189 with first year | $29 | about $60 | from $449 |
| Service | $5 / month | about $15 / month, prepaid | none | $5 to $10 / month | from $9.99 / month |
| Battery life | up to 3 months | 1 to 3 months | about 1 year, coin cell | up to 14 days | about 30 hours |
| Real time location | Yes | Yes | No, nearby iPhones only | Yes | Yes |
| LoRaWAN long range radio | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| WiFi & Bluetooth | Yes | Yes | Bluetooth only | Bluetooth only | Yes |
| Activity & sleep | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Emergency LED beacon | Yes | Yes | No, sound only | Yes | No |
| Made in America | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Competitor pricing and battery figures come from manufacturer materials and published reviews as of July 2026 and can change. Check each maker's site for current details.
Pricing
One collar addon tracker with real time location, activity and sleep tracking, and an emergency mode with a flashing LED. The battery lasts up to three months.
Location tracking service, billed monthly with no annual contract. Turn it off when you do not need it and the hardware is still yours.
Reserve yours