so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly it feels like a slot machine most of the time, you click a callsign, exchange the 73 and thats it, no actual contact made if you know what i mean

someone at our club meeting mentioned JS8Call a few months back and i finally got around to installing it last weekend. took me a bit to figure out the relay and store-and-forward stuff but once it clicked i actually had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Montana while running like 10 watts into my end-fed on 40m. felt more like actual ham radio to me

the decode sensitivity isnt quite as deep as FT8 obviously but for what it does its pretty impressive. my question is whether anyone has found a good balance between running both on the same band at the same time, right now im just alt-tabbing between WSJT-X and JS8Call but that seems janky. also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 regularly because the JS8Call guys on the reflector kept bringing it up like its the comparison point and i havent touched PSK in probably 8 years

yeah the slot machine thing is exactly how i describe FT8 to people who ask why i dont seem excited about my DXCC numbers anymore. JS8Call scratched that itch for me too, though i'll be honest the activity level is pretty thin outside of a few calling frequencies. 40m around 7078 seems to be where most of the action is in north america at least from what ive seen.

as for running both at once, what i do is use two separate instances of audio routing through VB-Cable or VAC depending on your OS and just have the radio in split or use a second SDR as a panadapter to monitor. its not as clean as id like but it works without the alt-tabbing situation. some guys use two separate radios which is obviously the cleaner solution if you have the shack space for it.

PSK31 is basically dead here in the midwest, i fire it up occasionally on 20m and might see a handful of signals in a 30 minute window. the guys still running it are diehards and honestly i respect it, there's something satisfying about watching those waterfall traces that FT8 kind of killed off

RTTY contester here so take this with a grain of salt but i think people undersell how much FT8 hurt weak signal HF in general. like yeah the mode is incredible technically, -20 something dB SNR is nuts, but the 15 second sequencing and the contact format basically stripped out everything that made weak signal ops interesting to me

JS8Call I keep meaning to try. does it handle the timing drift differently than FT8? i had a friend say somthing about it being more forgiving on that end but wasnt sure if that was accurate or just wishful thinking. also what software are you using on the logging side, i cant find a clean way to get JS8Call to talk to my logging software without a bunch of manual entry