Lucky Duck Revolt 2.0 Review

The short version

I have run a lot of callers. I told you on the best coyote call page that this is my top pick, and this is the long version of why.

• Buy it if — you hunt open country, you need volume, and you want sounds the coyotes in your area have not already heard
• Think twice if — you are hard on gear, or you hunt in gloves you never take off
• The headline feature — 200 preloaded sounds by Rick Paillet on a 2,000-sound capacity
• The real headline — five-year warranty, where the old Revolt had one

One thing I want to say up front, because it is true and most reviews will not tell you: the 2.0 is new, and most of what you will read online about “the Revolt” is about the old one. The forums are full of Revolt owners and almost none of it is 2.0 feedback yet. Where I am telling you about the previous generation’s problems below, I will say so.

Volume

This is the one where the marketing and the reality actually line up. It is loud.

Volume is not the same as better — I have said that in how I score these and I stand by it. But volume is what carries a sound on a windy day, and in the country I hunt there are a lot of windy days. The Revolt has enough of it that I have stopped thinking about whether the call will reach.

The tweeter is the part that matters more than the raw number. Plenty of calls will get loud and turn to mush doing it. The Revolt keeps the high-frequency distress sounds clean at the top of the dial, which is exactly where most calls fall apart. Owners running it against a FOXPRO X24 consistently report the same thing — the Revolt has more output and holds together better at full volume.

I have not put a decibel number on it yet. Every other call on this site was metered at one meter and this one gets the same treatment, but I am not quoting a figure I have not taken myself. That reading is pending.

The sound library

This is why I own it.

Two hundred sounds come loaded, compiled by Rick Paillet, and it will hold two thousand. I never thought I would prefer a library to FOXPRO’s — I said as much when I first picked up a Lucky Duck, and I was wrong. The recordings are cleaner through this speaker than anything else I own.

There is a second reason that has nothing to do with quality. FOXPRO is everywhere. If you hunt pressured ground, the coyotes in your county have heard the standard FOXPRO sounds more times than they have heard a real rabbit. Playing something they have not been educated on is worth more than another five decibels.

The card takes .mp3, .wav, .wma and Lucky Duck’s own .LD files, so you can load whatever you want. If you buy through Rick’s Verminator store he usually bundles a stack of extra sounds in, which is worth knowing before you buy it somewhere else for the same money.

The remote

The LD2XR remote is new for the 2.0 and it is a direct answer to complaints about the old one. Backlit buttons, a 2.5-inch screen, and ten brightness levels with day, dawn and night modes. The old remote’s screen was too bright at night even on the night theme, and enough people said so that Lucky Duck clearly heard it.

Range is rated past 300 yards. In my experience Lucky Duck remotes reach better than FOXPRO’s do, and I am not the only one who thinks so. ICOtec still beats both on pure range.

Two honest cautions, both carried over from the previous generation:

• The buttons are small. Old-remote owners complained they could not run it in heavy winter gloves. Whether the 2.0's backlit buttons fixed that, I cannot tell you yet — mine has not been through a real cold snap
• Watch the channel switch. It gets bumped in a pack and the remote quietly stops talking to the caller. Tape it to channel one and forget it
• Fresh batteries fix most weirdness. If the remote gets glitchy, that is the first thing to try, not the last

Note that the LD2XR only works with the Revolt 2.0. It is not backward compatible, so if you have an older unit this is not an upgrade path.

Decoy and rotation

The three-speed motorized decoy and the 360-degree rotating base are genuine differentiators, and FOXPRO charges you extra to get anywhere near them.

Coyotes want to see something attached to the sound they are hearing. If they cannot, they will swing downwind to find out what it is, and downwind is where you lose them. Something thrashing at the sound source keeps their eyes off you long enough to get the shot.

I will be honest about the rotation, though: I do not use it much. Plenty of experienced callers say the same. It is a good feature and I am glad it is there, and most days I leave it alone.

One small thing worth knowing: on the older units the little rubber cap over the decoy and antenna storage was notorious for falling out and getting lost on the first trip. Check yours is seated before you walk off.

Build quality — the honest part

Here is where I have to be straight with you, because this is the criticizm Lucky Duck has never fully shaken.

The plastic feels cheap. It has for years, across the whole line. Owners report lost antennas, lost battery covers, water getting into the battery compartment in light rain, and in one case internal wiring snapping at 20 below. That last one is a single report rather than a pattern, but it is the kind of failure that ends a trip.

The 2.0 ships with what Lucky Duck calls an updated housing for improved durability. That is an explicit fix attempt, and I take it seriously — you do not redesign a housing and quintuple a warranty unless you know what people have been saying.

But I am not going to tell you it is solved, because nobody has a full season on a 2.0 yet, including me. Ask me again in March. If you want the short version today: this call sounds better than a FOXPRO and is not built as well as one, and that has been true of every Lucky Duck I have owned.

Store it battery-side-down in the truck. That alone prevents most of the water complaints.

The warranty is the actual news

Five years against manufacturing defects, on all four of the 2.0 callers. The previous generation carried one.

That is the single biggest reason to buy a 2.0 rather than a used original Revolt, and it is worth more than any spec on the box. A company does not go from one year to five on a product line criticized for durability unless it has changed something and is willing to bet on it.

Read the fine print, because it is not unlimited: original purchaser only, proof of purchase required, you pay the shipping to send it in, and it does not cover submersion, drops or normal wear. That is a normal warranty, not a generous one — but five years of manufacturing coverage on a call in this price bracket is a real de-risking of the thing people were right to worry about.

Against FOXPRO and ICOtec

This is the comparison everybody actually wants, so here is my decision rule.

There is an old line on the forums that I think is genuinely the best advice in this whole category: whatever brand is most popular in your area, buy the other one. The coyotes have heard the popular one.

If you want to see how another caller stacked up under the same testing, the Foxpro Deadbone review scored 84 out of 100.

How it scored

Every call gets tested at the same place against the same ten criteria, out of a possible 100.

• Caller design — decoy and rotation built in, runs without the remote. Good
• Call volume — the strongest thing about it. Meter reading pending
• Sound quality — best library I own, clean at the top of the dial
• Portability — around 4.7 lb with the bag and tripod included
• Build quality — the weak point, and the reason this is not a perfect score
• Remote design — big readable screen, ten brightness levels, small buttons
• Remote functionality — easy to learn, easy to run without looking down
• Remote range — rated 300+ yards. Range test pending
• Pricing — around $600, with features FOXPRO charges more for
• Best selling feature — the sound library, by a distance

No overall score yet. Two of the ten criteria are still untested, the volume reading and the remote range, and a number out of 100 with two blanks behind it is a made-up number. The score goes up when both are done.

Check the price on the Revolt 2.0

If you are building a kit rather than replacing one call, the full gear list covers what else goes in the bag, and how to call coyotes covers what to actually play once you have got it set out.