Best Coyote Call

What actually matters in an e-call

I score every call I test against the same ten criteria, at the same location, out of a possible 100. Four of those ten decide almost everything:

• Sound quality — not sound count. Two thousand sounds you never play is a spec, not a feature
• Volume — loud does not mean better, but it is what carries the sound on a windy day or in snow
• Remote range and readability — 100 yards or more, in a screen you can read without your glasses
• Weight — you are carrying this up to ten miles. Small and compact beats a folding blob

If you are choosing between two calls and cannot decide, buy the one with the better remote. You interact with the remote on every single stand, and a remote that fights you costs coyotes.

My top pick: the Lucky Duck Revolt 2.0

Lucky Duck earned this spot the hard way. I was skeptical of them for years — I never thought I would like a sound library more than FOXPRO’s, and then I used one and was blown away by what came out of the speaker. That has not changed with the 2.0 generation.

The five-year warranty is the part I would not skip past. The previous Lucky Duck units carried one year; the 2.0 series carries five. An e-call lives in a truck bed and gets set in wet sage in the dark, and a company willing to stand behind one for five seasons is telling you something about how it is built.

Two hundred preloaded sounds is more than you will ever need on a stand. Load capacity is 2,000, so there is room for anything you want to add — with space left over for your George Strait albums.

If you want the most call you can buy

The rechargeable pack on the Super Revolt 2.0 is worth more than it sounds. Ten AA batteries is a real running cost across a season, and cold weather eats them faster than you expect — I have watched an external battery pack lose its charge in a morning at 20 degrees.

The FOXPRO side

I have called a lot of coyotes with FOXPRO units and I am not talking anybody out of one.

I called and killed my first coyote with a CS24, several years ago now. It was a windy day, 10–15 mph gusts, and the call had no trouble reaching out and pulling that dog in from several hundred yards. That is the thing FOXPRO has always been good at, and the reason I still check their lineup first when someone asks about volume.

The Shockwave deserves a specific mention. It was groundbreaking when it came out, it is still on the shelf nearly a decade later, and it still puts out around 118 decibels at one meter through four speakers — louder than most calls on the market, whatever they claim on the box. The only things I never liked were the weight and the rubber latches on the speakers.

Under $350

A built-in decoy matters more than most hunters give it credit for. Coyotes want to see something attached to the sound they are hearing, and if they cannot, they will work downwind of the caller to find out what it is. Something moving at the sound source keeps their eyes off you.

Under $200

This is where most people should start, and there is no shame in it. A cheap call you carry beats an expensive one you left at home.

One warning, and I learned it the expensive way on an older ICOtec unit: do not load sounds onto one from a Mac. If you do, the call will fire up and announce “Please insert SD card” in a loud human voice, over and over, until you make it stop. There is no faster way to blow a set.

What changed since this list was written

This page first ran in 2017, and almost everything on the original list is discontinued. The Lucky Duck Revolution — which I called the best e-call I had ever used, and meant it — is gone. So is the FOXPRO CS24C, the Banshee, the Fusion, the Inferno and the ICOtec GC500. Of the nine calls this page used to recommend, the Shockwave is the only one still in production.

If you own one of those calls, you did not buy a bad unit. They were the right answer at the time and most of them still kill coyotes. But a roundup nobody maintains is worse than no roundup at all, and this one went nine years. It will not go nine again.

The Foxpro Deadbone review is still up, scored at 84 out of 100 under the same system, if you want to see what a full write-up looks like.

What about mouth calls?

This page is only about electronic calls, but I use mouth calls all the time now, almost more than e-calls. An open-reed howler and a fawn distress on a lanyard will kill coyotes that have heard every electronic sound in the county.

If you are building a kit rather than buying one call, the full gear list covers mouth calls, decoys, seats and shooting sticks, and how to call coyotes covers what to actually play once you are sitting down.