so ive been on FT8 for a couple years now and its fine, great for getting contacts when the band is rough, but i keep hearing people talk about JS8Call like its this whole different thing and i guess i dont fully understand what the actual use case is supposed to be. like FT8 is basically just exchange callsigns and signal reports and thats it right, you cant actually say anything. i get that JS8Call is more like... free text? but i tried it a few times and it felt really slow and honestly wasnt sure if the people i was hearing were even responding to me or just doing their own thing.

also while im at it — does anyone still actually use PSK31 regularly? i have fond memories of it from like 2012 or whenever i first got my general but every time i tune around 14.070 it feels pretty dead compared to what it used to be. RTTY still seems alive especially during contests but PSK feels like it just kind of faded out once FT8 showed up. curious if thats just my perception or if the mode actually died off.

running an IC-7300 into a dipole at about 35 feet if that matters, usually 40 or 20 meters for this kind of stuff.

yeah you're not missing anything, they really are pretty different tools. FT8 and FT4 are basically contact-making machines, the protocol is so rigid theres almost no room for actual communication, which is kind of the point — it works when nothing else does. JS8Call is more like a messaging system that happens to use a weak-signal waveform. the latency is painful compared to FT8 but if you want to actually type words to someone across a noisy path its genuinely useful. i know some emcomm folks use it for exactly that reason.

as for PSK31, yeah its mostly dead on 20 and thats just the reality post-FT8. you'll occasionally find activity on 80 meters still, and there's still some on 40 late at night, but the waterfall that used to be wall to wall PSK signals around 14.070 is just... not there anymore. i miss it a little honestly, there was something nice about actually having a conversation in real time. FT8 is efficient but its not really hamming in the traditional sense if you know what i mean.

JS8Call clicked for me once i stopped thinking of it like FT8 and more like a slow text message app for HF. theres a relay/store-forward thing it can do where messages kind of hop through other stations which is pretty wild when it actually works. not something youre going to use for a casual ragchew but for like passing a message when conditions are terrible its a different beast than anything else out there. the learning curve is real though, the interface is a bit clunky and figuring out the addressing took me a while.

your 7300 and a dipole is more than enough for any of this stuff btw, i work JS8 with way less and it does fine.