I have been a varmint hunter most of my life. In recent years most woodchuck in my area (catskills) have dissappeared due to a large and growing Coyote population. I have decided to start hunting them and am looking into electonic calls. I would love to have imput from those of you who have experience. Looking at Stewart calls. Have been warned to stay away from extreme Dimensions calls. Need direction. A cheap call that works would be OK if possible. How about remote digital calls?

Thanks in advance!

Remote, digital, and cheap don't go together. Your best deal would be a Johnny Stewart cassette caller with an extra 50' extension cord to get your speaker 75' away from you. You can usually find a used one for about $100 with some tapes. The best deal on a remote digital right now are the reconditioned FOXPRO's. You can call Mike Dillon at FOXPRO and check on availability. For digitals, I personally would go with FOXPRO or Loudmouth. You can change the sounds on both units yourself. I have used both. You will get more sounds for less money with them. The Burnham Bros. Compucaller II is excellent at $300, but you get four sounds on individual chips and have to buy more individual chips to get more sounds. The new Johnny Stewart is STILL not out and has the 4 sounds per sound card. You must purchase additional sound cards and must like the 4 sounds they put on the card.

Good Hunting,

Bob

I own a Loudmouth caller and chose it over many others out there because of its flexibility with loading sounds.

I find using an electronic caller, regardless if it is a remote or with a speaker wire, causes lots of "activity" before you begin to call. I think the more you can "slip in" un-noticed the better results you will have. So I still prefer using hand calls.

Hand calls DO cause the predator to focus on you since you are the source of the sound. This requires you to be better concealed than you would when using a remote speaker on an electronic call. But with a hand call you can easily vary the pitch, "urgency" and tone of the call. With a hand call if you have a hunting buddy, you can seperate a short ways from one another and one can be the shooter while the other is the caller. Hunting alone, I like to use the electronic caller to force their focus away from me.

As you can see, they both have their trade-offs. As I said, I have and continue to use both, depends on the setup where I will be calling.