so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the DX is insane but honestly it feels like im just clicking buttons and watching a waterfall. theres no real communication happening, right? like i worked a station in vietnam last week and all we exchanged was signal reports and grid squares. fine i guess but its kind of hollow after a while.

anyway a buddy of mine at the club keeps talking up JS8Call and how you can actually send messages back and forth, do store-and-forward stuff, even run it without internet which sounds cool for emcomm purposes. but im wondering if the bands are actually active enough to make it worth setting up. i already have WSJT-X dialed in pretty much perfect on my IC-7300, audio levels good, no overdriving, the whole thing. dont really want to mess with a new setup if the JS8Call calling frequencies are just dead most of the time.

also does anyone run both at the same time on different bands? i have a second radio (old 718) sitting around doing nothing, wondering if i could run JS8Call on one and FT8 on the other simultaneously without the audio interfaces getting confused. or is that just asking for trouble.

JS8Call activity really depends on your region and time of day honestly. 40m around 7.078 tends to have the most action, at least here in the midwest. 20m is spottier. the store-and-forward relay thing is genuinely cool and works better than youd expect when propagation is sketchy. i use it mostly for ARES stuff and the ability to leave a message for someone who isnt on frequency right now is actually useful in a way FT8 just isnt designed for.

running two rigs simultaneously is totally doable, i do it all the time. the key is making sure each radio has its own dedicated USB audio interface — dont try to share one. i have a signalink on the 7300 and a cheap Behringer UMC22 on my backup rig and windows sees them as completely separate devices, no conflicts. just watch your RF around the shack because if youre getting any feedback into the audio chain itll corrupt the decodes fast. ferrite on the USB cables helped me a lot with that.

yeah FT8 is great for the log but i felt the same way after a few months, its basically a robotic handshake and then you move on. switched a lot of my time to PSK31 on 20m and honestly even though the dx isnt as wild theres actual ragchewing happening. people send their name, qth, weather, rig info, the whole thing. feels more like radio.

never really gotten into JS8 but curious about it. does it actually decode as weak as FT8 or is it more like a traditional PSK mode sensitivity wise?