so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and filling in the log but honestly it feels more like a video game than actual radio sometimes. you click a callsign, the macros do everything, you get a confirmation in LOTW and thats it. no real exchange, nothing.

started messing around with JS8Call a few months ago and its a totally different vibe. like you actually type stuff to people. i worked a guy in Montana last week during a really rough band opening on 40m and we had an actual back and forth conversation, signal was only like -18dB and it was totally readable. that kind of thing just doesnt happen on SSB when the bands marginal.

my question is whether anyone is actually using it regularly enough that theres activity on the calling frequencies or if its kind of a ghost town. i tune around and sometimes i see a few relayed messages and occasional beacons but actual live QSOs seem rare. also curious if anyone has compared it to Winlink for emergency comms purposes since the store and forward thing in JS8Call seems interesting but i dont fully understand how reliable it is versus a proper Winlink gateway setup.

JS8Call activity kind of depends on when and where you look honestly. 40m around 7.078 tends to have the most traffic at least in my experience, evenings are better. i ran it for like 6 months solid and had some genuinely good contacts, talked to a guy for probably 45 minutes one night on 20m while a thunderstorm was killing propagation. the heartbeat and relay stuff is neat in theory but in practice i found it pretty clunky compared to just using Winlink if you actually need to pass traffic. for casual ragchewing on weak signals though theres nothing quite like it. PSK31 used to fill that niche but good luck finding a busy PSK cluster these days, everyone jumped to FT8 and kind of abandoned the conversational modes. which is a shame really.

yeah the FT8 video game thing is real lol. i still run it because DXCC isnt gonna fill itself but i get what you mean. tried JS8Call twice and both times i just sat there watching the waterfall with nobody responding so i gave up probably too early. might try again on 40m like the other guy said. one thing i will say is that for actual weak signal work if you havent tried FT4 during contests its surprisingly useful, faster than FT8 and still pulls stuff out of the noise that SSB would never touch. ran it during a state QSO party and it was kind of a revelation for low power operation.