so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly the 15 second exchange thing gets old when you just want to talk to someone. like theres no actual communication happening, just signal reports and grid squares.

started poking around JS8Call last month and the concept is interesting — its built on the same WSJT-X encoding basically but stretched out so you can type actual messages back and forth at like -24dB or whatever. latency is obviously rough since each transmission takes longer but at least you feel like youre having a QSO and not just logging a contact.

wondering if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its kind of a ghost town on the bands. i tried 40m around 7.078 a few nights ago and heard maybe 3 or 4 stations but nobody responded to my CQ. could be my timing or the propagation was just weird that night. also not sure if im supposed to be running it in turbo mode or normal, the documentation is kind of all over the place.

not looking to abandon FT8 entirely, just want something where i can actually exchange more than a grid square with someone

JS8Call is definitely not as populated as FT8 but its not dead either, you just have to know when to look. 40m late evening seems to work okay for me, usually see a decent cluster of activity around 7.078 like you said but also try 7.079, people scatter a bit. the HF nets that run on it are probably your best bet for actually getting a response — there are a few that run scheduled times and theyll respond to pretty much anyone who shows up.

normal mode is probably your best starting point, turbo is faster but the SNR advantage shrinks and honestly if the other station isnt running turbo you'll just confuse things. i run normal at 40 watts into a dipole and work stations pretty regularly, nothing exotic. the thing that got me was the heartbeat feature — once you set that up your station kind of announces itself automatically and you start seeing responses without even actively calling CQ, which is nice when youre just monitoring.

PSK31 scratches that same itch if you havent tried it, way more conversational feel and the waterfall activity on 20m can still be pretty good on weekends. old school but it works.

yeah js8call is kind of a niche thing, i check in on it occasionally but its hard to justify the time when ft8 just works and racks up contacts. i get what youre saying about it feeling hollow though, worked like 180 countries on ft8 and i couldnt tell you a single thing about any of those operators lol.

the latency thing in js8call is real and it kind of kills the flow of a conversation for me. by the time youve exchanged 4 or 5 messages youve spent like 20 minutes on one QSO. i dunno, maybe im just impatient. rtty still feels more alive to me for actual chatting even if its not as weak-signal capable, at least people type complete sentences at a reasonable pace