so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and the signal reports come in fine but honestly after a while it feels like im just clicking buttons and not really talking to anyone. like theres no actual exchange happening beyond grid squares and signal reports.

started poking around JS8Call last month and the concept is interesting — basically takes the weak signal capability of FT8 but lets you actually type messages back and forth. latency is rough though and the protocol feels kind of clunky compared to WSJT-X. anybody here running JS8Call regularly and finding it worth the time investment? i keep hearing people use it for EMCOMM stuff which makes sense to me but for casual ragchewing on HF it feels like it hasnt really caught on the way FT8 did.

also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 for the low-power ragchew thing. i remember that being the go-to before FT8 kind of ate everything. my old IC-7300 decodes it fine and fldigi works but the bands feel pretty quiet on PSK frequencies most of the time now.

yeah the FT8 thing gets old fast once you realize every QSO is basically identical. i went back to PSK31 for a while and honestly still prefer it for actual conversations — you can send paragraphs, talk about your rig, whatever. the problem is finding activity, like you said. 14.070 used to be wall to wall PSK and now its pretty sparse depending on the time of day. i usually check around 10-11 UTC on 20m and can usually find a few stations but you have to be patient.

JS8Call i played with for a few weeks and the relay/store-forward feature is genuinely clever but the UI drove me nuts. maybe its better now, i havent updated in like 6 months. for EMCOMM groups that have scheduled nets it probably makes more sense than me just randomly calling CQ into the void with it.

RTTY is another one people forget about — still pretty active during contests and the exchanges are at least a little more interesting than FT8. plus theres something satisfying about watching the tones come in on a waterfall and having fldigi or MMTTY decode it in real time. old school but it works and the contesting side of it is still pretty healthy, CQWW RTTY gets a ton of participants every year.

FT4 i think is kind of the middle ground speed wise but i never see much outside of contests honestly. might be worth trying during FT4 activity days if those still happen.