For sound amplification equipment I will review four general areas of equipment getting larger and more expensive. I am not stating that any one category is more effective as I don’t think that louder is better.

For this post we will start out with the lowly cell phone. It may sound silly but several years ago I put the Illinois Howl on my cell phone as the ring tone. It is a great conversation starter in public and almost always gets a comment from strangers when I get an incoming call .

At the end of Jun 2006 I told my wife I was going to go down near the creek where we lived and play-back my cell phone ring-tone of the Illinois Howl. She laughed and said don’t be silly, nothing can hear that ring. My response was that I bet I can hear that ring-tone from at least 50 feet and a squatch could hear it from at least 200 feet. So I went down into the pasture and stood next to the only tree growing along the fence row. I played two or three ringtones with the phone and went back to the house.

The next day I was down at the creek and as my son and I were walking back up through the pasture along the fence row my son said “Dad, look at that tree.” My response was well let’s go get the camera and let your mother look at it too. When I later asked my wife what she thought she said “I know what caused that but I don’t want to hear about for the next three months!”

Here is my blogpost from the 6th of August 2006.

I don’t like evaluating tree breaks or twists. I don’t recognize them as being bigfoot related. There are just too many other things they could be attributed to: storms, winds, old age. I don’t say that Uncle Harry didn’t do it as some type of territorial marker, I am just saying it is “not my thing.”

On the 1st of July 2006 this twelve foot tall four inch diameter maple tree was snapped in two along the path in the pasture just up the hill feet from my feeding station. There had not been any other damage on my property or my neighbors property. There was a path of knocked down tall grass from the hay field to the east directly to the tree.