so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working new countries but lately i feel like im just clicking buttons and not actually doing any ham radio if that makes sense. its like a video game almost. anyway someone at our club mentioned JS8Call as a way to have real qsos on weak signal and i installed it last weekend but im a bit confused about how the timing works compared to WSJT-X. like with FT8 everything is locked to the 15 second cycles and you cant really deviate but JS8Call seems more freeform? i tried calling CQ for like 20 minutes on 14.078 and got nothing, not sure if i was doing something wrong or if the band was just dead or if nobody monitors that freq.

also wondering if the SNR sensitivity on JS8Call is anywhere close to FT8. i know FT8 can decode stuff way down in the noise like -20dB or whatever and thats half the reason it works so well on marginal conditions. does JS8Call get close to that or is it more like PSK31 territory in terms of what it needs to work. been running 100w into a trapped vertical if that matters

yeah JS8Call is definitely more freeform, thats kind of the whole point of it. its based on FT8 encoding but the way it handles messaging is asynchronous so you dont have to be on at the same time as the other station which is a cool concept. the sensitivity is decent but not quite FT8 levels, i want to say its something like -24dB for FT8 vs maybe -18 or so for JS8Call depending on speed setting. theres actually three speed modes, normal, fast, and turbo i think, and the slower ones get you better weak signal performance but its a tradeoff.

14.078 is the right freq but honestly activity is pretty sparse compared to the FT8 watering holes. i tend to have better luck on 40m in the evenings, 7.078 i think is the standard spot. stick with it though because when you do get a contact its a lot more satisfying than the usual 73 and done you get on FT8

I had the same feeling about FT8 honestly, feels automated after a while. I went back to RTTY for contesting because at least you're typing stuff yourself even if it's still kind of a macro fest. PSK31 on 14.070 used to be where all the ragchewing happened but that seems pretty quiet these days, at least on my end. might be a time of day thing but i dunno it feels like everyone just moved to FT8 and stayed there