DC30s changing ID?

[Cooch]

Wasted a bunch of time this Saturday, and ended up with a pretty stiff hike to recover a hound because my pair of DC30 collars were not on their assigned ID. (Mixed team and the collars were switched on as the hounds were swapped into another crate, the lack of immediate signal on my tracker was assumed to be simply the normal time taken for the GPS to get a fix:oops:).

My best guess is that when the collars were lent out a fortnight ago, there was an ID conflict and a new user used the "change ID" option when the conflict message came up. They swear that they didn't, so maybe it was a case of fumble-fingers.

Whatever.... the questions I have at the moment are...
(1) Is there any known issue that may cause the collars to change ID apart from using the 220 tracking unit?
(2) Does anyone here have a good back-up system for such problems that does not include putting a telemetry collar on the dog as well.

In the event, the dog was found by identifying unit ID's that were flashing conflict messages, turning off those collars, and cycling through potentially conflicting ID's until; one came up trumps. A pain in the neck, but it eventually worked. If only Garmin had included the ability to store all potential IDs on the tracker, instead of just 10.

[tman308]

I have never had any of my collars change id on me. The safest bet would be to turn the collars and the unit on several minutes before turning loose and ensuring they are being tracked. I have had on occasion had collars that took several minutes to be recognized by the Astro but never any changed Id's.

[Redneck]

before my dog even gets turned loose i make sure i have a signal on here that way i know where she is all the time