10 Days of ATA #6—The Wapiti Whacker Bugle Tube Belts Out High-Volume Calls

Hi, I'm Rocky Jacobson with Rocky Mountain Hunting Calls. We've been in business now for 26 years. I'm the original inventory and designer of the Palate Plate Diaphragm elk calls, which, we have a variety of different calls that we make. We try to fit everybody's different size of mouth, so they go into your mouth properly, and seal good, and work properly for you. But this year, for 2018, we've unveiled here at the ATA show, which I'm attending now, and we're going to show you what we have new for the elk lineup calls.

To start off with, we have the new grunt tube that we call the Wapiti Whacker. The Wapiti Whacker is kind of a combination of all of the grunt tubes that I've made over the years. I've been trying to come up with different ideas to make grunt tubes sound better, work easier with your mouth diaphragms. On this particular Wapiti Whacker grunt tube, I've come up with the idea to put a stretchable rubber sleeve over the end of the grunt tube. One reason for that is when you're walking through the woods carrying the tube, you have a tendency to hit limbs with the end of the tube. So now when it hits it it's going to muffle that, and it doesn't have all of the ping sounds that elk pick up on when you hit the limb. It also helps to dampen the bad plastic sounds that you can possibly get out of tubes. It enriches the sounds that you produce through there, especially on your deep bass sounds like grunting, and chuckling, and lip ball sounds. It helps carry the tones better all the way through when you're using a mouth diaphragm.

And on the mouth calling end, I have what we call the V.E.T.T. System. The V.E.T.T. System, V-E-T-T, stands for Volume Enhanced Tone Technology. What it amounts to, is there's a spring inside the end of the mouth piece. What this spring does, it will create more volume when you're blowing into the call with your mouth diaphragm. It helps stabilize the note changes, especially when you're doing your octave changes from low notes to high notes. Then, when you get that high scream and challenge elk sound from a bull elk, and you're trying to accomplish that same sound, that spring will help stabilize that highest note, and intensify it to where they can hear it better, and it's a higher screaming sound.

On the end, you notice it's got a mouthpiece that's smaller. Some people like a smaller mouthpiece to blow into. Some people like a bigger one. So we have developed an enlargement ring that will snap on the end of that so you can have a different feel to the end of the mouthpiece. It will create different sounds when you blow into the smaller end than it will the big end, so you have versatility of different note changes.

The tube really has some great qualities to it, and produces some great sounds. We put it out into the field for field tests this last fall before we unleashed it with 24 different pro staffers using our calls, and 21 of the pro staffers killed elk with it. So it's pretty good odds. The other three would have killed elk, but they weren't as good a shot. They got to shoot, but they missed.

To go along with the grunt tube, we've designed two different reeds. The first one I'll talk about is called the Black Magic. The Black Magic, we've come up with a new frame. The frame is called the Golden Tone Plate, GTP. And we've enlarged the size of it on the inside, made it a little bit wider than normal. The dome on top is shaped a little bit different. The latex we use is a different type of latex. It's a clear natural, but it has a different thickness, and it stretches a little different than our normal calls do. It's designed to give you your younger sounding cows and calves, and your younger bulls. It's a lighter latex, so when you blow into it you're going to get different sounds, as replicating your younger elk sounds.

Very easy to accomplish those sounds, because the light latex makes it work a lot easier. Then, when you go after your bugles, it's going to sound like a younger bull sound.

When you get into the next diaphragm we created, it's called the Reaper. The Reaper has the same frame, the GTP frame. It has a little heavier latex, and we stretch it differently. It has the same shape of dome as the Black Magic. But this call is designed to sound like older cows, and bigger bulls. And you get more volume. You can really reef on this call and let her rip.

That's become my favorite call. I like to reef on calls and get a lot of volume out of them. Finally, we have what we call the Voodoo Open Reed Cow Call. The Voodoo is coming with an acrylic barrel, which gives you a good quality sound. Acrylic is just designed to give you that good quality sound that you're looking for. The soundboard now has two little portholes that are in the side of the soundboard. What that does, it lets the air escape a little bit on the side, so it gives you a little subtler, softer mews, and it eliminates the vibration in this area so you're not getting those goosey sounds.

What I like about it, I'm getting those nasal mew sounds all the way from the very beginning of your high note to your low end. This is going to be really a cool call. It's a very pretty call, beautiful body on it. Made from acrylics.

We have a lot of different calls we make, all the way from turkey, predator, moose calls, wolf calls. We have some new rattle cages that we rattle the whitetail in with, and also, we have the rattle cage for elk that can be used for rattling in elk, sitting on water holes or in a tree stand. Come look us up here at the booth at the ATA show, number 111.