so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working DX with a compromised antenna setup (im on a second floor apartment with a random wire out the window, dont judge me) but honestly i feel like im just clicking buttons and logging callsigns and theres not really any... i dunno, ham radio feeling to it? like theres no actual communication happening

someone at our club meeting mentioned JS8Call and how its basically built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but lets you actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff through other stations, even do some basic store-and-forward messaging. ive been poking around with it a bit and it seems interesting but the SNR performance obviously takes a hit compared to pure FT8

curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly on HF and whether its worth having it in the mix alongside WSJT-X, or is the weaker weak-signal performance kind of a dealbreaker when youre already fighting a mediocre antenna situation. also wondering how active the bands actually are on JS8 — like is there enough activity that you can find someone to have a real qso with or is it mostly tumbleweeds

I run JS8Call pretty regularly on 40m and sometimes 20m and honestly the activity is decent, not FT8-level obviously but theres usually a handful of stations calling CQ if you hang around long enough. the 40m evening hours are probably your best bet in North America.

the SNR thing is real — JS8 Normal mode is noticeably less sensitive than FT8, maybe 4-5dB or so, and with a compromised antenna that does matter. but they added the Turbo and Fast modes which close the gap some. the Slow mode goes the other direction and actually gets you deeper into the noise but then youre waiting like 30 seconds per transmission so conversations get painful fast

i think the honest answer is you kind of want both running. WSJT-X for the DX chasing and log filling, JS8Call for when you actually want to talk to someone. theyre solving different problems even if the underlying tech is similar. i use a SDRplay as a panadapter alongside my IC-7300 so i can watch both frequencies at once without having to retune constantly, makes it way more manageable

tbh i tried JS8Call for like two weeks and went back to just running FT8 and occasional PSK31. the activity on JS8 felt really thin from here, maybe a regional thing, im in the upper midwest. could never quite find that critical mass of people actually wanting to chat vs just beaconing their grid and moving on

PSK31 still gets my vote if you want an actual keyboard-to-keyboard qso with decent weak signal performance. yeah its not as deep in the noise as FT8 but with a reasonable setup and a decent waterfall you can pull out signals you'd never hear on SSB and the conversations feel like actual conversations. theres still activity on 14.070 area if you look for it