Halo Collar 4, All New GPS Wireless Dog Fence & Dog Training Collar with GPS Tracker, Subscription Required, Waterproof, One Size, Graphite

Customer Reviews (722)

1. 

   Robin – May 7, 2025

   Rated 1 out of 5

   I attempted to use this collar in two settings. My home, a 1/4 acre urban lot and a campsite at a large campground in a rural area. Both areas had trees surrounding the fence, but only one within the area of the fence. I have spent about 40 hours trying to get the product to work. Read every support document related to the issues, watched countless videos did Google searches. I spent at least two hours on the phone with Halo support. The reps are the most polite I have ever encountered. Each time they act as if this is the first time they have encountered the issues and research them while you are on the line, despite the issues appearing on Google searches and in multiple reviews. They were unable to come up with solutions and followed up with e mails that don’t directly direct the issues.

   First, fence design. The Halo 4 no longer allows you to walk with a collar and create custom fence lines from point to point. You must put in an address and the app shows a fence line based upon the satellite imagery of your property line. The satellite imagery of the properties are extremely blurry. You can evaluate four different GPS sources, none were accurate for either location I tried. Structures and hazards are not accurately located in the images, so you must walk the fence line you created many times with the collar to edit the line. The GPS location on your phone and that of the collar are sometimes 10 feet apart, despite holding each at the same time. The phone appears to be accurate, the collar is always off. When you are in fence edit mode, the location of the collar disappears, and you can only see your phone so you have to guess how far off they are from each other, edit the segment, save it, then walk it with the collar to see if the line is in the right location. The image that appears when editing fences has graphic overlays with hazards, buildings and water that were never accurate. This makes it more challenging with the blurry image to be able to spot landmarks and place the line segment accurately. You can’t make two different fences on your property (I wanted a front yard and a back yard). The app won’t let you have overlays, so you can’t generate the same property twice, then later make them separate by editing. After spending about four hours generating a fence for my property, I managed to construct one. I confirmed it with the collar. The feedback to the collar was delayed about 30% of the time, or did not occur. Multiple times the dog would get shocked while not receiving any of the preventative feedback regarding the fence line. The shock would be delayed and the dog was totally confused as to why it was being shocked and at that point was well beyond the line. This happens with the GPS feedback or manual feedback. Two subsequent days, I attempted to use the fence with the collar on the dog. The fence completely moved from day to day, and within hours, sometimes up to twenty feet. I would redesign the fence, get it just right, then it would move again. I noticed it was more accurate with cellular coverage, vs. wifi. I wanted to disconnect the wifi. You can’t remove the collar from your wifi network, or blue tooth on your phone. Solutions I received from customer support was to change the wifi router password (would require reconnecting all my other devices), manually go into the router and delete the device, or delete the collar from the app (how would I use it). It can’t be factory reset to start over without wifi. In my conversations with support, I stated that this would be non functional at a campground or beach area as is advertised. If you download the address for a campground, there may be hundreds of campsites and editing down the fence line to your site would take at least an hour. I was told often the addresses for campgrounds indicate campsites. I was right. It took an hour to zone into my campsite. Again, none of the four satellite images were accurate and were completely blurry. I created a fence, walked it with the collar, it was fine. Put the collar on the dog, again feedback sometimes didn’t occur or was delayed. Four hours after the fence creation, I heard the collar providing feedback while the dog was in my RV. The line had completely shifted. So the collar wasn’t going to work for any application I needed it for, both of which Halo represents that it will, so after investing all that time in effort, I had to return it.
   When I purchased the collar, I also purchased a beacon to block out an area, directly from Halo. I received an order confirmation, but no follow up on shipping status or arrival time. I contacted Halo to cancel the order since I was returning the collar and explained the situation. The beacon had still not shipped, but they would not cancel the order and said it was not returnable. I later received an e mail confirming this, offering a Halo gift card for my effort. Why would I want a gift card for products that don’t work?
   There is a reason all other GPS collar companies clearly state collars won’t work on less than 1/2 acre, with nearby structures, etc. It can’t be done. I spoke with Halo before buying the collar and asked how it was their product could work on smaller lots, campgrounds, etc., when other couldn’t. The answer was that their technology is superior.

2. 

   Melanie M. – June 3, 2025

   Rated 5 out of 5

   A daily review: Day 1: Directions are easy to follow, with short video demos also. Ninja is wearing the collar comfortably with only “two fingers slack” beneath it. I won’t cut the VERY long collar until we are sure we will keep this; a zip tie is holding the loose end for now. PS It was delivered one day earlier than projected- nice jumpstart for training… Day 2: Training is going well. He has already learned the whistle encouragement in our lessons. Taking our time, no rushing as I want to do it right. Also, the collar went almost two days on first charge. It is nice to get the collar status on the app so you know when battery is getting low. Stay tuned for day 3. Skipping forward to day 6: Recap of the past few days is that we were busy with other things and didn’t do much training. However, we have been consistent with the whistle training; this training is so easy to do. Today Ninja was very tired when we returned home from a fun weekend at our camper. His fatigue was perfect for training this afternoon. On a very loose leash, he chose to not go beyond the boundaries. He stopped walking and turned around- you could tell he was “catching on” that the warning and boundary feedbacks were enough. The level 4 for “emergency” seems to be working but when he is more spunky tomorrow, I will see if he still stays put even if there is something enticing over the boundary ( I will put steak fat and steak pieces within his scent area, but outside of his range). My only negative feedback so far is regarding the set up-having so many choices for the encouragement and prevention settings. The settings we chose are (for encouragement) the “long whistle, level 5:; we have “double paw tap” for warning and “buzz” for the boundary. I still am not sure if these are the best for him or if any one of them would do the job. Also, once you create a fence, make sure to turn on feedback- it took me awhile to figure out why the fence wasn’t activated! I like that I am not the “bad guy”; I am not scolding, pursuading, or pulling on the leash. To Ninja, his boundary is now clearly consistent so there is no uncertainty So far, I am really impressed… It is expensive, but if it ends up working, what is my beloved dog’s life worth? I had been nervous as it seemed like there were very mixed reviews. This has now taken less than a week- this wasn’t even delivered til just 6 days ago. Ninja hasn’t been traumatized in any way. Yes, he has had to learn some lessons that were not fun and enjoyable, but these lessons beat getting hit by a car, shot by an angry neighbor if he trespasses on their livestock, getting lost, or caught in some coyote trap. In the meantime, this beautiful, one year old, 50+ lb rescue dog is now enjoying exploration and life outside of a shelter….feeling sunshine and love and hopefully soon exploring 15 acres. Stay tuned. Day 7 and likely my final review: We are sold on this system. This morning, Ninja saw a rabbit and did try to chase it. He quickly came back home and we can see on the map that he had gone into the emergency area. He also went into a different emergency area (by the road) a few hours later. I know this isn’t the most pleasant experience for him but again it beats him getting hit by a car or causing some kind of an accident (especially when a side by side goes by or horseback riders). We know that with time he will learn the boundaries and really enjoy his freedom. This is a very impressive system. Hoping that there won’t be any glitches in the future. PS the battery is going strong with 24 hours left. A nightly charge is perfect. Day 8: One more thing… I know this post is long- you are debating buying an almost $600 item so, you want to be sure and you are reading this. I saw a few reviews that say the collar loses signal and you can’t see feedback. I only know from our experience that it loses signal when Ninja is right next to the house- this makes sense and is no big deal as he is safe there. Day 10- I got nervous and had my doubts when I got notifications that the connection was lost, especially when Ninja was down in the trees and I couldn’t see him. Then I read that this may be due to a weaker wifi ( country living) and that the fence is always on due to it relies on GPS. It was scary to not do live tracking and stunk that I couldn’t use the whistle command, but it was very reassuring to see him come back even when he was under trees and in heavy brush. I continue to be impressed!