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All good advice so far.
While a half mile is not necessary every time, I like to get far enough from the truck that it is unlikely coyotes will associate my sounds with the sounds of traffic. Two things help, distance and time. I like at least 400 yards or more from the truck. I also like to park it behind a ridge or in a hollow to muffle sounds. I think more than 10 minutes or so and coyotes forget the vehicle sounds. We often just sit and wait a few minutes after the setup to let things forget what they heard as we moved in.
My favorite call setup is to just peek over a ridge of some sort to get a really good field of view and then call over the ridge. Approach sounds are deadened, the extra "altitude" helps hide scent and provides a good view, you can show only your head and shoulders over it and that can be broken up with low scrub, my shooting sticks are always long enough, and the call will travel long distances. But watch your back.
Seldom do we try one spot for more than 15-20 minutes. We have to be pretty certain something is around and heard us before we will wait much longer. Occasionally we have had success with longer waits, but not often enough to make it worth the time. Maybe we're just impatient. Sometimes it's just too cold to sit around.
A 30 second series of calls and then wait a few minutes is lots of calling. We seldom use baits or decoys as foster described because we don't want our scent spread around our location any more than we must. Wandering around just increases the odds of being busted.
The most quiet, unexposed, direct route planned with the wind in mind to allow us to get the sound of the call into the most likely coyote bedrooms is our thinking.
Then watch your back.
Calling from dense cover works for sure, but requires the coyote to get very close before YOU can see HIM. The odds climb in his favor as he gets closer. The advantage humans have is sight. He has ears, an incredible nose, and eyes almost as good as yours. If you allow approaches through dense bush he will use those senses, and you will call way more coyotes than you see. If you want proof, start taking walks in big circles around your calling location before you leave. You will find tracks of curious coyotes you never saw way too often.
Try to set up with much more open country around you. Allow yourself to see them coming from a long way. If you don't need binoculars to examine your farthest view, you are giving them an advantage. Until you are more confident, don't give them anything.
I have called coyotes by just lying on my back in a patch of what we call "badger brush" in open prairie, and sitting up slowly every once in a while to see what was happening. Once I sat up to see a coyote sitting about 20 feet away, ears cocked and head tilted trying to figure the situation. How he got there I'll never know, but there was a lot of very fast scrambling by both of us before he got away. Coyotes scramble very fast once they decide scrambling is necessary.
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