so ive been running FT8 for about a year now mostly on 40 and 20m with a modest setup, like 25-30 watts into a wire dipole in my attic. works fine, log lots of DX, whatever. but i keep reading about JS8Call and how its supposedly better for weak signal stuff and also lets you actually have a conversation unlike FT8 which is basically just an automated exchange machine.

tried JS8Call for the first time last weekend and honestly i dont know what to think. the waterfall seemed a lot less busy than FT8 which makes sense i guess since fewer people use it. made a couple contacts but it felt slow. like really slow compared to just watching FT8 rack up QSOs.

my question is mostly about the weak signal performance. is JS8Call actually pulling signals out of the noise better than FT8 or is that kind of a myth? i know FT8 is rated to like -24dB SNR which already seems insane to me. does JS8Call go deeper than that or is it just different. also is there a meaningful community on JS8Call still or did most people just stick with FT8 and call it done

the short answer is no, JS8Call doesn't actually decode weaker signals than FT8 does. FT8 uses LDPC coding which is really well optimized for that -24dB floor and JS8Call uses a different variant of the JS8 waveform that trades some of that raw sensitivity for the ability to have longer message exchanges. so they're kind of solving different problems. FT8 is basically a contest mode whether people admit that or not, and JS8Call is more like a text messaging system that happens to work when conditions are rough.

the community question is real though. JS8Call definitely thinned out after the first couple years. you'll find decent activity on 40m in the evenings, some guys running it portable or from SOTA peaks where the conversational aspect actually matters. if you just want to see how far your signal reaches, FT8 is still the answer. if you want to actually type words to a person, JS8Call is genuinely useful for that. theyre not really competitors in my opinion

yeah what he said about the sensitivity is basically right. i messed around with JS8Call a bunch during a field day type outing last summer running it off a battery with maybe 10 watts and a vertical, got into some guys pretty reliably but nothing that made me think wow FT8 couldnt have done this too. the thing i actually liked was being able to relay messages through other stations, theres a store and forward thing baked in that could be genuinely useful for emcomm type stuff if anyone actually trained on it which they mostly dont lol

PSK31 still has a soft spot in my heart btw, used to run that back when it felt like magic that you could type to someone across the country at like 5 watts. feels ancient now but its still out there