so ive been running FT8 for a while now and honestly love it for working new grid squares and chasing DX but it gets a bit hollow after a while, like youre just exchanging signal reports and thats it. someone on a local net mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically built for actual conversations on weak signal, which sounds interesting but i cant quite figure out if its worth the learning curve or if the bands are just dead on it most of the time

my setup is pretty modest, ic-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, so weak signal stuff is kind of important to me since im not running a kilowatt into a yagi or anything. i tried firing up JS8Call last weekend on 40m and heard maybe 3 or 4 stations but wasnt sure if i was decoding right or what. the interface is a little different from WSJT-X and i may have had the audio levels off

also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 with any regularity because i learned that years ago and it was kind of fun being able to actually type back and forth in near real time, just feels like nobody is on anymore. or am i looking in the wrong places

JS8Call is definitely more alive than PSK31 at this point but yeah the activity can be pretty thin depending on time of day and band. 40m is probably your best bet, try around 7.078 MHz and just let it run for like 20-30 minutes before deciding the band is dead. the decoding is different from FT8 because it uses longer transmissions and is more tolerant of drift so sometimes what looks like noise is actually someone coming through. audio levels matter a lot, i usually aim for the waterfall showing peaks around -20 to -30 dB or so and make sure youre not overdriving the input or youll get all kinds of garbage decoding.

the thing i like about it is you can actually have a back and forth that feels like a real QSO and not just a log entry. not for everyone though, some guys just want the contacts and thats totally fine

PSK31 is still out there, 14.070 on 20m still has some life on weekends, not like it used to be but people are on. I actually prefer it over FT8 for exactly the reason you said — feels like a real conversation. RTTY still has contest weekends which keeps it going too if youre into that. but yeah FT8 kind of ate everything when it came out, hard to argue with the propagation reach you get from it even with a modest antenna like yours