  Relativistic amplification boosts the contribution of the jet base to the
total emission in blazars, thus making single dish observations useful and
practical to characterise their physical state, particularly during episodes of
enhanced multi-wavelength activity. Following the detection of a new gamma-ray
source by Fermi-LAT in July 2017, we observed S4 0444+63 in order to secure its
identification as a gamma-ray blazar. We conducted observations with the
Medicina and Noto radio telescopes at 5, 8, and 24 GHz for a total of 12 epochs
between 2017 August 1 and 2018 September 22. We carried out the observations
with on-the-fly cross scans and reduced the data with our newly developed
Cross-scan Analysis Pipeline, which we present here in detail for the first
time. We found the source to be in an elevated state of emission at radio
wavelength, compared to historical values, which lasted for several months. The
maximum luminosity was reached on 2018 May 16 at 24 GHz, with
$L_{24}=(1.7\pm0.3)\times10^{27}\ \mathrm{W\,Hz}^{-1}$; the spectral index was
found to evolve from slightly rising to slightly steep. Besides the new
observations, which have proved to be an effective and efficient tool to secure
the identification of the source, additional single dish and very-long-baseline
interferometry data provide further insight on the physics of the source. We
estimate a synchrotron peak frequency $\nu_\mathrm{peak}=10^{12.97}$ Hz and a
Doppler factor in excess of $\delta\sim5.0$, with both quantities playing a
role in the gamma-ray emission from the source.
