so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, like i worked a station in japan last week with maybe 5 watts and a dipole that definitely isnt optimized for 17m, but at the end of the day you're basically just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and thats... it. doesnt really feel like ham radio to me sometimes, more like a slow ping utility.

anyway i started messing around with JS8Call last month and its a completely different vibe. you can actually say something to another station, have a back and forth, send store-and-forward messages through relay nodes, whatever. the tradeoff is obviously the mode is way less sensitive than FT8 — JS8 at normal speed is supposedly around -16 or -17 dB S/N compared to FT8 which is what, -24 dB? so you're giving up a good chunk of that weak signal margin.

my question is whether people actually use JS8Call regularly enough on the bands that you can find activity without just sitting there waiting. i check 14.078 sometimes and its pretty quiet compared to the FT8 watering holes. is there a better time of day or a net or something im missing? also running WSJT-X and JS8Call at the same time on the same radio, is that asking for trouble or do people do it routinely with a virtual audio cable setup?

yeah the activity question is the real issue with JS8. its there but its not like you can just spin up the software at 2pm on a tuesday and expect a pile of folks waiting. the 40m JS8 frequency gets more use than 20m in my experience, especially in the evenings. theres also a handful of nets — the winlink adjacent crowd sometimes uses it, and theres some emcomm groups that run JS8 drills but you'd have to dig around to find their schedules.

as for running both at once, i do it all the time with VAC routing into two instances. just make sure you're not keying both at the same time obviously, i use separate VOX timings and keep an eye on it. havent had a conflict yet but im also not running high power so if something went sideways the worst case is a stepped-on transmission not a blown finals situation. the bigger annoyance is keeping the audio levels sorted between the two apps because WSJT-X can be kind of grabby about the soundcard if you're not careful with the virtual cable config.

honestly i felt the exact same way about FT8, like congrats you exchanged a signal report with someone 8000 miles away and now what. i tried JS8 for a while and it scratched that itch a bit more but i eventually ended up going back to PSK31 for ragchewing because theres still a decent community on 20m around 14.070 and the mode is old enough that a lot of guys have it just sitting there in their logging software already. not as weak-signal capable obviously but if conditions are even halfway decent its perfectly usable and a 10 minute conversation actually feels like a contact. just something to consider if the whole appeal is actual communication vs just the technical challenge of the weak signal side of things.