so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and all that but honestly it feels more like playing a video game than actually talking to anyone. you know what i mean. the whole 15 second exchange thing is fine if you just want a grid square but thats about all you're getting out of it.

anyway a buddy of mine at the club keeps going on about JS8Call and how you can actually send messages back and forth, relay stuff through other stations, even store and forward messages when someone isnt on frequency at the same time. sounds interesting but he also says the decode sensitivity isnt quite as good as FT8, which makes sense because you're sending actual text and not just a fixed format message.

my question is whether anyone has actually used both regularly and can tell me if JS8Call is worth setting up alongside WSJT-X or if its kind of a niche thing that only a handful of people are actually running. i dont want to go through all the config headaches if its basically a ghost town on the dial frequencies. running a IC-7300 into a trapped vertical on 40m mostly, sometimes 20m in the afternoon.

I run both and honestly they serve pretty different purposes. FT8 is just a contact machine, theres no two ways about it. JS8Call is slower, yeah, and you wont get the -24dB decode sensitivity, more like -24 in ideal conditions but realistically weaker than FT8 when signals are borderline. that said when a signal is decent you can have an actual back and forth which is refreshing.

the activity question is real though. on 40m at night i usually find a dozen or so stations on 7.078 which is the standard JS8 dial. not a ton but enough. 20m during the day is spottier. i think of it like PSK31 was back in its heyday, not every frequency is jumping but if you park and call CQ for 15 minutes somebody usually shows up. the store and forward and relay stuff is genuinely cool if you have a few friends who run it regularly, we use it in our emcomm group as a backup messaging system and it works pretty well for that.

worth setting up if you have the patience for it. config isnt that bad once you've done WSJT-X, its basically the same audio interface setup.

yeah the activity thing is the real issue tbh. i tried it last winter and could never find anyone to actually have a conversation with on 40, just a bunch of beacons and automated stations. maybe i was on at the wrong times idk. FT4 is kinda in between if you just want something faster than FT8 but it has the same problem where theres no room for actual words

if you want real text conversations PSK31 still has some life left in it, theres usually activity around 14.070 on 20m and its weirdly satisfying to just type at someone in real time. RTTY is fun too if you want to feel like its 1985