so ive been running ft8 for about a year now and yeah its great for contacts and filling in the map but honestly after a while it starts to feel like youre just clicking a button and watching a computer talk to another computer. not much operating skill involved if im being honest with myself.

someone at the club last month mentioned js8call and said its basically ft8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff through other stations, even do some basic messaging over hf without internet. that actually sounds interesting to me. my setup is pretty modest, ic-7300 into a trapped vertical, so im not running a kilowatt or anything, but ft8 contacts usually arent a problem even at 50 watts.

my question is kind of twofold i guess — is js8call actually used enough that youd find other stations to talk to on a random weeknight, and is the weak signal performance close enough to ft8 that id still get through when band conditions are marginal? i know its a wider bandwidth mode so im assuming the sensitivity isnt quite the same but i dont really know the numbers off the top of my head.

also still have a soft spot for psk31 but man that waterfall is a ghost town compared to what it used to be. feels like everyone just migrated to ft8 and never looked back.

js8call is definitely worth playing with but you're right that the activity level is spottier than ft8. i'd say on 40m you can usually find someone in the evenings, 20m during the day occasionally, but dont expect the wall-to-wall signals you see on the ft8 segment. the heartbeat feature is kind of cool though — stations periodically beacon their info so you can see whos around even if nobodys actively calling.

sensitivity wise its not quite ft8, the decode threshold is somewhere around -24db if i remember right vs ft8s -24 too actually, hmm maybe theyre closer than i thought. the messages are longer so the timing is different. honestly for ragchewing purposes the tradeoff is fine, you dont need to be copying -20db stations to have a decent qso. your 7300 and vertical will be totally fine for it.

psk31 i still check once in a while out of nostalgia. caught a decent dx station on it last winter which was a nice surprise. but yeah the activity collapsed pretty hard after wsjtx took off.

i set up js8call maybe 6 months ago and honestly use it more than ft8 now just because it feels like ham radio again. yeah you wont work 200 countries in a weekend but you can actually ask someone how their antenna is holding up in the wind or whatever. theres a small but pretty active group on 40m around 7078 i think, late evenings eastern time theres usually a handful of stations around.

one thing nobody told me when i started — the store and forward messaging thing is really neat for emcomm type stuff, messages can kind of hop through stations that are running unattended. not sure how reliable it is in practice but the concept is cool. anyway if you already have wsjt-x dialed in the audio setup for js8call is basically the same deal so it wont take long to get running.