so ive been running ft8 for about a year and a half now and i really enjoy the weak signal aspect of it, like working stations with a -20 or worse is still kind of magical to me even after all this time. anyway someone at the club meeting last week was talking up js8call pretty hard and said it fills a niche that ft8 doesnt really cover because you can actually have a conversation instead of just exchanging signal reports and grid squares.

i get that, ft8 is basically automated at this point and yeah i use it for dxcc hunting but there isnt really any rag chewing happening. my question is whether js8call is worth the time to learn properly or if its one of those modes that sounds great in theory but the band activity just isnt there. i tried tuning around 40m last night around the js8call frequencies and heard maybe two or three stations in like 45 minutes which was a bit discouraging. is that typical or was i just unlucky with timing?

also curious how it compares decode-wise to ft8, like is the sensitivity in the same ballpark or does it need stronger signals to work? running a ic-7300 into a g5rv so nothing exotic here.

js8call is genuinely good but yeah you're right that the activity level is the main problem. its kind of a chicken and egg thing where people dont hang around because no one else is there. best times ive found are weekend mornings on 40m and sometimes 20m in the evenings. there are also some nets that run it specifically so worth looking those up, the js8call groups io page has a schedule i think.

decode sensitivity is a bit behind ft8 from what i can tell, like you're not gonna pull -24 dB signals out of the noise the way wsjt-x does. its built on a similar foundation but ft8's timing and the way it encodes is pretty optimized for pure sensitivity whereas js8call trades some of that off for the free text capability. still works fine with a modest setup like yours though, the ic-7300 is more than enough.

if you already have the audio interface sorted for ft8 the setup is pretty painless since js8call uses the same basic soundcard approach. i'd say fire it up and just leave it running while you do other stuff, you'll start seeing contacts trickle in.

honestly i flip between ft8 and psk31 more than js8call but i did spend a few weeks on it last winter. the conversations you can have are nice, feels more like actual ham radio than ft8 does. but i got frustrated with how slow it is, even in the faster speed modes its not exactly snappy. if you're patient it's rewarding, if you want quick contacts not so much. RTTY still gets more activity on contest weekends than js8call does in my experience which kind of says something about where the hobby is at right now.