Coyote Caller

[TrapLine]

Went out to try out a new coyote caller this evening and see if there are any yotes around. Didn’t get to go to far away from home so took it to the training grounds in CNF. I will be trapping here in the fall so it will be a daily visit through winter once the season opens.

I got this caller off Amazon which takes returns back pretty easily so figured to try it out, see what I like and dislike about it and buy a different model if I want to. One of the reasons I was wanting it was the 300 yard remote range, seemed like a lot of the callers were 150 yard. I want something I can place in center of an area similar to the pic below, siting where the pic was taken.

I dont know if I am sold on the decoys that are out.

What are you guys using?




Found this spot today, To get that much flat area out here is rare. If I can just locate a few more sets like this I may be able to put together a decent archery hunt out of public land close to the house. Still lots of water spread around.

 

[HATCHET1]

Trapline...is there a monetary surplus in trapping the few critters CA allows to be trapped? Or is it for the love of the game? Asking for a friend.

 

[TrapLine]

Gas money

 

[HATCHET1]

What i imagined...good for you dude..get um!

 

[TheGDog]

Just be careful and handle gingerly that antennae on that ICOTec man. You can easily crack that thing while reaching out your hand to grab and perhaps exerting a force momentarily in a wrong direction... even before you've grasped the dang thing and "Snap!" like a dried twig! And the calls themselves are not good fidelity recordings. Some of 'em are "Ok", but some of um are pretty bad.

I already told you man. Try that Johhy Stewart Grim Speaker GS2 model. You can load in your own sounds into it. The fidelity is much better, and louder and their calls seem to have decent recording fidelity to them.

And we've proven (You and I) that they work.

When you put your ICOTec remote into your pack, you may want to remove the battery, otherwise since there's no turn-off switch it something pushes on the buttons of the remote while it's in the pack... then when you reach your destination... you have what happened to me first time I went to use the ICOTec 300 I had... the remote was dead because apparently something pushed up against the buttons in the pack and drained it's funky special sized A23 battery.

For the motion decoy I like the Mojo Critter 2, if only from the standpoint of since it has it's own shock-chorded 3 legs... there's no messing around with a screwed-in spike... nor dealing with hardened ground that doesn't want to penetrate...AND you can set it on top of a stone for a little bit of elevated viewing distance.

Also the Mojo Critter 2 seems to go a real long time on one set of batteries. Like almost 2 full days worth of sets.

 

[rbduffer]

Larry nailed it. I've got that ICOTec caller. I broke the antenna, killed the batteries and now carry spare batts and electrical tape.
It works great on dumb dogs but tends to scare away the big guys. There aren't many dumb dogs left, (cuz I shot them) so I'm looking to upgrade at this moment. I may look into this Johnny Stewart thing. Good luck out there.

 

[TheGDog]

Right off the bat, the clarity of the calls is significantly better. And it's not much bigger overall in size. Same amount of batteries too. The speaker horn is just a greater diameter. And the remote works better than the one on that ICOTec 300.

About the only nice thing about the limited remote on the ICOTec is that you can learn to know the buttons by feel in terms of their placement on the remote... so you don't have to look down at the remote as much, which creates head movement which*could* conceivably give you away a time or two during your sets. But that's minor. I'd much rather have the greater remote range and see and read the volume setting number on the remote. And have the feedback of seeing the remote change the Stop Icon to a Play icon to indicate that it registered my keystroke and should execute the command in a moment.

I checked into the GS2 because of watching Les Johnson on his Coyote Hunting YouTube channel use it on several occasions. Also found YouTube channels that side-by-side compared those two units. Definite improvement in clarity and fidelity of recordings and playback.

Oddly... the mp3's which are loaded on from them... they must be of an MP3 format that is somehow protected because copying them out of the unit and attempting to play them in WinAmp on my Desktop machine was strangely a no go situation.

And controlling the top-to-bottom ordering of the sounds in the remotes menu list is easy... all the MP3's in it have like "000 <The Sound Name>" and "001 <TheNExt Sounds Name>" as the name of the files and the remote knows to not display the number part of the filename... but that numeral part of the filename controls the top-down ordering of them in the list.

So if you add a new sounds, it's real easy to know exactly where you'd like it to show up in the menu.

 

[TheGDog]

It works great on dumb dogs but tends to scare away the big guys.

Yeah.. first time I really used it... these yotes on other side of the ravine where just barking at it. That same bark they do when they bust you visually. The would not come over. At the time I didn't dare try to peak out from behind the bush I was hidden behind. Because they sounded soo close I knew they'd see me and the jig would be up.

 

[TheGDog]

Just noticed... looks like they modified their antennae so it now uses a metal base for the folding point of the antennae. If you're lucky... that *may* prevent that problem of snapping the cheasy antennae.