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Trail Tracker
1234 42nd St.
Fargo, ND 58102
11/16/15
Jim Prescott
1 Cabela Dr.
Sidney, NE 6916
Dear Mr. Prescott,
Hello, we hope this letter finds you doing well. We would like to take a
moment to thank you for working with us the last few months. We are
grateful for the assistance and opportunities that you have provided us. We
are excited for the potential opportunity to work with you as our exclusive
retail partner. Currently we are looking for funding to start the production of
our product
Our Product, Trail Tracker, is a GPS device that attaches to an arrow and
when shot into an animal will detach from the arrow and become implanted
in the animal. The implant will be attached using a barb and will be trackable
using an app available for all smart phones. There are similar products in
circulation, but they are either extremely expensive or very limited in their
range and capabilities. With the fast growth of the sport of bow hunting there
is an untapped growing market for a product like ours.
Enclosed you will find our design proposal. We appreciate you taking the
time to read our proposal. We are looking forward to our meeting next
Thursday morning.
Regards,

The Trail Tracker Design Team

Luke Heil, Ryan Bruggeman, Ryan Lacher, Taylor Kampa

Trail Tracker
A Solution to Finding Game
Taylor Kampa, Ryan Bruggeman, Ryan Lacher, Luke
Heil
11/16/15

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Executive summary
Bow hunters face a unique challenge in todays hunting world. Due to
elements outside of the hunters control, they may have a hard time tracking their
animal after fatally wounding it. An arrow sometimes does not have enough kinetic
energy to pass through the animal if it hits a rib or shoulder, this will cause the
blood trail to be very minimal. This makes the animal extremely difficult to track.
This is where our product, Tail Tracker, comes in.
The trail tracker is a GPS tracking device that fits around any arrow, directly
behind the broad head. It is able to transmit a GPS signal to any smart phone with
our corresponding app, with a range of up to 10 miles. The Trail Tracker is designed
to be aerodynamic, light, and evenly weighted. This allows the arrow to fly almost
exactly the same as when the Trail Tracker is not attached. The Trail tracker uses a
barbed hook to catch to the deers hide as the arrow enters. The GPS chip and
battery are attached to this barb and slide out of the housing, allowing the arrow to
continue passing through unhindered.
Currently, there are 2 major competitors in the market. Pro tracker makes a
transmitter that ia limited in range, and extremely expensive. There is also an arrow
insert that utilizes RFID technology. This is much more affordable, but the range is
limited to a few hundred feet. The Trail tracker improves on both of these products
in range, overall design, and price.
The Trail Tracker is on the cutting edge of both GPS and smartphone
technology. It is small and light enough to allow the arrow to fly unhindered, but
tough enough to withstand extreme impact. The Trail Tracker is an affordable way to
find game quickly and easily for hunters of all experience levels.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Background/Context
Bow hunting has been around for a very long time. Arrow heads have
been found in Africa dating back to before 25,000 BC (Brissee 1). Even
though bow hunting is very old, there is still a lot of money put into the
research and development of new bows, arrows, and accessories. Hunting
(including bow hunting) is still very popular and is a fast growing sport in the
United States. The Trail Tracker is the next huge breakthrough in the bow
hunting industry.

Problem

Tracking wounded animals can be a very difficult task when the blood
trail is scarce do to unfortunate circumstances. A hunter may hit a rib or a
shoulder of an animal, which stops the arrow from passing through. This or a
high lung shot from ground level leads to a dead animal that is extremely
difficult to track. Many people hunt in very dense woods which makes
tracking even tougher. Currently there is no reliable way to track game
quickly and efficiently when the blood trail runs out that is economical to the
average bow hunter. The Trail Tracker is the solution to this problem.

Constraints
There are many constraints that have to be taken to account for in a
GPS chip attachment for an arrow. The first constraint is the weight. It is very
critical that the weight of the GPS chip and housing is extremely small.
Arrows are designed to be very light so a hunter is not going to add a Trail
Tracker to their arrow if it is too heavy. Similar to the weight of the Trail
Tracker, the balance is very important. If the flight path is thrown off by and
unbalanced arrow, nobody will buy the product. The GPS tracker is useless if
the animal is missed. The next constraint is the cost. Bow hunting is not a
new sport, people have been doing it for many years without being able to
track game using GPS so they wont want to spend a lot of money on
something theyve never used before. The product has to be functional but
cost effective for the user. The GPS chip also has to be very durable. It has to
be able to withstand very warm and sub-zero temperatures. It also will be

subject to a large impact when hitting the animal. It is also very important for
the product to be very easy to attach and use, hunters dont want to have to
spend a lot of time attaching the chip housing. It will also be more appealing
to the older generation if it is easy to use. One of the most important
constraints is the range of the tracking capabilities. It doesnt do any good if
the game were to get out of the range. Finally, it has to work on all arrow
sizes and broad heads. This will expand the amount of people that will be
able to utilize the product.

Market Research
We started researching ways to track a wounded animal in the field. While
researching we discovered many different ways to track wounded deer. The current
leaders in tracking deer consist of blood lights, lighted nocks, and traceable arrows.
We decided to broaden the traceable arrow field by coming up with a design that
allows the GPS chip to stay in the deer in the case of a pass through shot or if the
arrow falls out while the deer is running away.
The history behind the product has many different areas. All are relatively
new technology in the archery field. For starters the GPS field is a broad one, in
which many new types of technology have surfaced in the last fifteen years. One of
the original GPS tracking devices was used to track criminals to make sure they
stayed within the boundaries they were confined to. This broadened into tracking
employees in the work place, phone tracking, implants for animals, key chain
trackers, and most recently game animal tracking (Kass). As the technology

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progressed the GPS devices continually have gotten smaller and more compact (RF
Micro Orients to Bluetooth). This has led to the creation of our top competitors.
One of the current top competitors is a Radio Frequency Interception Device
(RFID) arrow. These RFID arrows allow for users to reuse arrows, track kills, monitor
arrow distance, range and accuracy (RFID Arrow Tracker). The limitations of these
arrows are big ones. According to the makers of the RFID tracker, they can only
receive a signal up to a thousand metes. Which means if the animal passes that
threshold, you will lose track of your arrow and most importantly the wounded
animal. The other top competitor is called ProTracker. Their design uses a barbed
signal transmitter that attaches right behind the arrow head (Christensen). This
design has the potential to throw the accuracy of the shot due to extra weight at
the head of the arrow. While both of these designs are applicable, they have their
limitations and are very expensive. The ProTracker as it is retails for more than
$700 for a set (Christensen). When we saw the prices we knew we had to make a
product that was in the price range of the average hunter. We then shifted our
sights on the smaller and cheaper tracking technologies that already exist.
Some smaller competitors that we found on the market are blood lights and
lighted nocks (Fleet Farm, Gander Mtn, Scheels). These two products are much
cheaper and provide a more basic tracking method to GPS or other high-end
technologies. Blood lights are a flash light that come in a variety of options, such as
ultraviolet lights and filtered lens to make the blood of the wounded animal glow or
become more visible. While these lights are great when a blood trail is present,
they become useless if the blood trail runs dry. The other competitor that we came
across is the lighted nock. These lighted nocks replace the standard nock on the end
of the arrow and light up when the arrow is shot. This allows you to find the arrow

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in the dark but not track the animal when it runs away. While both of these
technologies have their places as cheaper options for tracking wounded game
animals, they are still limited. Nocks on arrows dont always work because arrows
rarely stay in the game animal if it runs away or passes through. Blood lights fail if
there isnt enough blood to track the game animal. After we had seen explored all
these options, we were confident in our design and began thinking about our
market.
The target market for these existing products are all archery hunters. For our
product specifically, we have focused on archery hunters ranging from the ages of
fourteen to forty-five. We decided on this age bracket for two reasons: first, the
older generation is more leery and uncomfortable with modern technology. Second,
the younger generation is very aware of new and game-changing technology and it
would be a perfect group for our cutting edge product.
Through our research, we have concluded that while there are many different
options when it comes to helping track a wounded game animal shot with an arrow.
There is still plenty of room for improvement, which is where our design fills the
void. Our design entails a tracker that will attach to the animal and release from
the arrow. It will utilize micro-GPS technology that will allow the user to track the
animal at any distance with a simple phone app instead of using an expensive
portable GPS system (Szondy). Our product will increase the chances of game
recovery so that all hunters can make ethical, and memorable hunts.

Physical Design
We came up with this idea for the design, with the problem in mind of
shooting a deer and having the arrow pass through the deer leaving you with a
blood trail. Sometimes the arrow passes through the deer you are left with a great
blood trail. But, what if the blood trail runs dry? If this happens the chance of
recovering the animal diminishes, and you lose what you waited patiently for and
worked so hard to get. This is why we came up with the idea of an arrow with a
detachable GPS on it.
Looking through the market we came across similar ideas but all of them had
one thing in common, they were all extremely expensive. Because of this price, your
average hunter would not be able to afford it. With this in mind we tried to come up
with a cheaper GPS tracker so that you could purchase our product without breaking
your wallet. What we came up with was a type of sleeve that fits around the entire
shaft so that the weight of it is distributed evenly around the arrow shaft. With this
design our tracker does not affect arrow flight. We incorporated a GPS chip into our
design due to the fact that GPS chips have longer signals and you dont have the
risk of losing your deer in the case that it runs out of the range of your tracker. The
GPS chip has a small hearing aid battery that clips into the bottom of the GPS chip.
This chip has a barb that screws into the back of the chip and is then inserted
tightly fits into the sleeve that goes around the arrow shaft. This sleeve then has a
hole that slides over the threads of the broad head. You can then screw the broad
head into the shaft and secure the sleeve in any position you want by tightening the
broad head onto the shaft as illustrated in the drawing below (Figure 1).

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Figure 1 Trail Tracker Rendering

This drawing shows where the GPS chip is located and also how you can
position the barb so that it is located in between the cutting edges of the broad
head. As the arrow impacts the deer or the target you are shooting at you are at
guaranteed that the arrow sinks in at least 3 to 4 inches. Consider the circumstance
that you hit the shoulder blade for instance, the arrow will not sink to far thats why
the barb will catch on the skin or hide of the animal and pull the GPS chip out of its
socket. Since the battery is clipped into the GPS chip it can be powered on
deployment of the chip. We came up with this idea in the circumstance that the
arrow as the animal runs usually ends up falling out of the animal, but since the GPS
sticks to the hide or skin you wont lose track of the animal.
Another point that we found problematic was the weight of the mechanism.
We came up with a material that can be 3D printed cheaply and effectively while
giving us the durability and lack of weight that we need. We decided to use glass
filled nylon, which is a very light weight durable material. The reason we used glass

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filled nylon (GFN) is because, it is naturally durable, easy to print, cheap,
waterproof, and light weight. This is exactly what we need for this mechanism. The
mechanism needed to be able to withstand an impact in the case of hitting a
shoulder blade; it needed to be waterproof due to blood getting on it in the case of
a hit, it needed to be inexpensive so that we can meet our goal of making it more
affordable than competitors designs. The weight of the mechanism is less than 25
grains so it wouldnt affect the flight of any arrow.
Another key constraint that we saw was the variation in shaft diameter for an
arrow. We found that there are many different diameters for arrow shafts that could
cause fitting problems when designing our tracker. Our solution to this constraint is
developing the Trail Tracker to be made in different sizes to fit any arrow shaft.
Overall, our design incorporated this day and ages technology so that hunters
can easily track the game that they waited so patiently for; this design is
inexpensive and light weight along with being durable and able to withstand the
elements.

Cost Analysis
When we designed the trail tracker our goal was to keep costs below $100.
This price makes the Trail Tracker an economical option for most bow hunters. This
final price includes packaging and retail markup. All cost estimates were made with
an initial production of 10,000 units. The material cost for 3-D printing includes the
cost to buy a 3-D printer so that we can do the printing in house. The barb
production will be done by a specialty company like VMC because the barb is very

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similar to a large fish hook. The Pricing of all components can be seen in table 1 on
the next page.

Table 1- Cost Table

App Design
The Trail Tracker will use a smart phone with the Trail Tracker app as a
receiver. Using a cell phone instead of a specialized receiver will make the cost of
the Trail Tracker much cheaper and easier to use because almost everyone is very
familiar with smartphones. The app will be available on both the Apple Store and
Google Play with both a free and premium version. The free version will have ads
and not have all the features that the premium app does. The premium app will cost
ten dollars and will be ad free and have more features than the free version. The
app will not only act as a receiver to track the arrow, but it will also be an all-in-one
app used for hunting. The main menu will look similar to figure 2, which is made up

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of the six icons representing the subroutines: Track, Map, Settings, Pair, Logbook,
and Weather.

Figure 2 Trail Tracker App

Track
The Track subroutine is the most important one. It is used to track game that
has been hit with the arrow. The GPS tracker chip detaches from the arrow so even
if the arrow passes through the animal or the arrow falls out when the animal starts
to run, the game will still be trackable. It will show the location of the animal in real
time. The location will be given by the direction and distance away and the speed it
is traveling. By knowing the speed it is traveling it will tell you if the animal is down,
walking, or running.
Map

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The Map subroutine will act just like any hunting GPS. It will utilize the
smartphones GPS to use it for navigation. It can be used to track the path that the
user has traveled throughout the day or to place and navigate to waypoints (such as
a truck or campsite). Various maps including contour maps or satellite views can be
used. The premium version will feature the ability to download these maps to the
smartphone to limit the use of data and for use in remote areas that do not receive
cell phone reception.
Settings
The Settings subroutine allows the user to customize the app. Some of the
things that can be changed are the arrangement of the main menu, where the user
wants to the maps to be saved (the phones internal memory or memory card), and
the mobile data can be turned off
Pair
The Pair subroutine is where the user links the GPS chips to the phone. While
pairing the GPS chips to the phone, they can be named to keep track of different
chips linked to the same phone. The user may want to have chips of multiple arrows
and this subroutine makes it easy to do so.
Logbook
The Logbook subroutine is very simple but potentially very useful. This allows
the user to log anything they want. Hunters are always looking for patterns to try to
predict where game will be at certain times of the day, and the effects that weather
has on the game. The Logbook allows the user to document where, when, and the
weather when animals are seen.
Weather

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The Weather subroutine is self-explanatory. It gives the user both current and
future weather reports along with radar. This helps the hunter decide if it is prudent
to continue the hunt.

Conclusion

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Bibliography
Brissee, Tom (2000). History of Archery. Strictly Bow hunting. Retrieved from
http://www.strictlybowhunting.com/Anov01issue/history_of_archery.htm
Christensen, Gary. "ProTracker." PRO-TRACKER ProTracker. Nifty Marketing, 2014.
Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
<https://pro-tracker:com/>
"Features." RFID Arrow Tracker. Weebly, .Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
<http://rfidarrowtracker.weebly.com/features.html>.
Fleet Farm, Scheels, Gander Mtn. Personal Interview/ observation. 20 Oct. 2015.
Kass, Sheldon. Portable Locating System. The Business Edge Group Inc., assignee.
Patent
5,389,934. 21 June 1993. Print.
"RF Micro Orients To Bluetooth, GPS." GPS World 15.6 (2004): 74. Business Source
Premier. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.
Szondy, David. "Coin-sized Retrievor Solar-powered GPS Tracking Device." Coinsized Retrievor
Solar-powered GPS Tracking Device. Retrievor, 23 Oct.
2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2015. <http://www.gizmag.com/retrievor-gpstracking/29477/>.