so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i love it for the DX hunting and all that but honestly after a while it starts to feel like youre just watching a slot machine, you know? you get the contact, log it, move on. theres no actual conversation happening.

a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and how its basically like a messaging layer built on top of the JS8 waveform which is derived from FT8 if i understand it right. supposedly you can have actual back and forth exchanges, send longer messages, even relay stuff through other stations. been reading about it but havent actually fired it up yet.

my question is for people who actively use both — do you find JS8Call worth running alongside WSJT-X or do you kind of have to pick one. and is the activity level on JS8Call decent enough that youre actually going to find someone to talk to on a given afternoon. i mostly operate 40m and 20m if that matters. running an IC-7300 into a trapped vertical so nothing fancy.

also been messing with PSK31 a little bit lately and honestly thats scratching the itch more for real conversations but the signals you need are way higher compared to FT8 obviously so weak signal wise its not even close

yeah i run both and they really do serve different purposes. FT8 is honestly just a logging machine at this point, great for filling in band slots and chasing entities but like you said theres zero rag chew happening. JS8Call is a completely different vibe. you can have a real conversation, its just slow and you have to be okay with the pace of it. think of it like texting on HF.

activity on 40m is pretty solid in my experience, especially evenings local time. 20m during the day you'll find stuff too but it depends a lot on propagation obviously. the heartbeat feature is kind of neat where stations periodically beacon out so you can see whos around without having to call CQ constantly. one thing i will say is the software is a little quirky and the UI takes some getting used to compared to WSJT-X which is pretty polished at this point. but once you figure out the group messaging and relay stuff it clicks. i dont think you have to pick one over the other, just run them on different VFOs or different rigs if you have that option. thats what i do, js8call on the 7300 and ft8 on my older 7200 when i want to run both at once

RTTY is still my go-to for an actual contest exchange that feels like operating and not just watching pixels. but for weak signal chatting js8call is pretty cool i tried it last winter during some really rough propagation on 40m and was copying stations that were completely buried in the noise, like i could hear nothing but the decoder was pulling text out. thats the impressive part to me. its not quite FT8 levels of sensitivity but its way better than PSK31 in the mud