Several years ago, Peter Brown – a Maine Maritime Academy of Castine graduate who was making his living in the shipping industry – had an innocent conversation that helped set him on an entirely new career course.

Always an avid outdoorsman, Brown walked around a friend’s pond one day and talked about a shared passion: hunting.

“[My friend] said, ‘I’d like to be sitting in a tree stand, push a button, and have the sound [of an animal call] come from down below,'” Brown recalled. “I said, ‘Well, we ought to be able to do that.'”

It didn’t take long before Brown and his friend were business partners. And the invention the pair had envisioned on that jaunt around a pond was more than a dream: It was real. And it was theirs.

“We had his neighbor put together this crude prototype out of off-the-shelf Radio Shack components,” Brown said.

Their invention, an electronic deer call, worked.

Since those early days, Brown and his father, Melvin Brown, have bought out Peter Brown’s original partner, and the family-run business – Extreme Dimensions Wildlife Calls – has taken off.

Brown says it’s an industry leader, and a glance at the most popular catalogs that serve hunters and outdoors enthusiasts bear him out: Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops are among the outlets that carry the company’s Phantom calls.

The company recently moved into a large facility in Hampden, and sold about 20,000 of the calls – retail price ranging from $169 to $269 – in 2004.

That first call worked on deer … and that’s it. Now, Extreme Dimension produces seven different models that can call deer, turkeys, bears, predators, moose, elk and geese. Each individual call can make 12 different sounds that may appeal to the species that’s being sought. And all of those vocalizations are held on interchangeable sound cards that can change a turkey call into a deer call in seconds.

“[In the beginning], you were restricted to one unit or another [according to] which animals you were looking to call,” Brown said. “Now you can just pop the face plate off [the remote control] and change out a sound card, so one unit will do it all.”

The theory is remarkably simple: Take digitally recorded animal noises, put them on a circuit board, and link a remote control to a speaker.

Then sit in a tree stand … push a button or two … wait. (And, as hunters know, hope for the best).

But producing a durable, trouble-free product that can handle extreme weather conditions that hunters (and photographers, another key market segment) are likely to encounter made things more complicated.

So, too, did the constant quest to keep improving the product, and to keep giving consumers new options.

“We started with one call and last year we had 32 products,” Brown said. “I think that next year it will be doubled again.”

New for last season was a popular wireless model with a range of up to 300 yards.

Five years ago, however, Brown was scrambling just to make sure he could take the first call to a market he thought would support it.

The goal: Have things ready for the annual SHOT Show, billed as the world’s largest hunting trade show.

Brown met that deadline … barely.

“We got the ‘patent pending’ the day before the show, went to the show with one working prototype and a bunch of mockups, and the interest was real good,” he said. “We decided we ought to make a go of it.”

Brown said the company rented a small 10-foot by 10-foot booth at that year’s SHOT Show, and were tucked away in the “Bargain Basement” section of the exhibition hall.

Now, he said, industry experts stop by often during the show and tell him they remember the company’s humble beginnings.

“That first year was quite a learning curve,” he said. “We thought just word of mouth would sell everything we needed to sell, and I think we sold about 1,800 calls the first year,” he said. “We placed an order for [enough parts to build] 10,000, so we were sitting on a couple years’ inventory that first year. We made quite a few mistakes that first year.”

You’d never know it now.

Brown’s company produces its own TV show – “Chasing the Dream” – that regularly airs on the Outdoor Channel, and may take that show to another network in the months ahead.

And the calls themselves continue to evolve.

Brown thought that the calls would be popular, and he was right. But it’s not just the ability to use actual animal vocalizations that has been attractive to users.

One selling point: animals (and other hunters) move toward a remote location – the speaker – rather than toward another hunter. A female hunter from Wisconsin told Brown that she had been shot by another hunter who thought her hand call was an actual animal, and stopped calling altogether. Now, using his product, she feels safe enough to call again, Brown said.

Another point in his call’s favor, Brown said, is that animals are moving toward something at ground level, rather than hearing a noise that they know is up in a tree.

“It’s not very realistic [when] you’re 25 feet up in a tree trying to call an animal to you,” he said. “Most of these animals have very good hearing. Twenty years ago, it was very rare that a deer looked up in a tree. Now, he hears a grunt, that’s the first thing he does is look up in a tree.”

Brown said even if an animal can’t be legally hunted with an electronic call, there are many hunters who buy his product to train at home before using the non-electronic calls that are allowed in the field.

“A lot of people don’t spend as much time in the woods as we try to,” he said. “And a lot of people are afraid to call, because they’re not sure, basically, what they’re saying [to the animal] if they do call. We’ve taken the guesswork out of it.”

Brown cautions that any call has its limitations, but is confident in his products, and the work that has gone into them.

“There are people who think it’s a magic tool, but it doesn’t work every time,” he said. “[Hunting] doesn’t work that way.”

As it turns out, one of Brown’s life dreams hasn’t worked out exactly has he planned, either.

“I was always a hunter. I hunted every day before school and after school in high school, and I always thought it would be great to be able to make a living doing it,” he said.

“But now that I’m making a living doing it, I’m not doing any hunting any more because the hunting season’s our busy season,” he said with a chuckle. “People think I get to hunt all the time. I get to hunt some places I never thought I would, but I actually hunt quite a bit less now.”

Monday’s ‘Going Outdoors’

In Monday’s ‘Going Outdoors’ segment of ABC-7’s 6 p.m. newscast you can get a closer look at the calls produced by Extreme Dimensions.

In our on-going cooperative venture with the Bangor TV channel, video man Dave Simpson of ABC-7 and I put together a piece on Peter Brown and the company he co-founded.

Though I’m basically an ink-stained wretch at heart, I admit that there are a few limitations to this news format. Letting you hear some of the Phantom call’s animal vocalizations, for instance, is something that newspapers just can’t do.

On Monday, Brown will let Extreme Dimension’s calls do the talking … although the interview proved fruitful, too.

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.