so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for contacts and watching the propagation but honestly it feels like a glorified beacon sometimes. you log the contact and thats basically it. someone at my club mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend and its a completely different vibe — like you can actually type back and forth with someone over a weak signal path which is what i thought digital modes were supposed to be about in the first place

my question is whether people actually use it regularly or is it kind of a ghost town on most bands. i found some activity on 40m around 14.078 i think but wasnt sure if i was even tuned to the right spot. also curious how it compares to PSK31 for actual ragchewing because i used to run PSK31 years ago on 20m and there was always someone to talk to on weekends

not trying to start a modes war just genuinely curious what people are using when they actually want to have a qso and not just exchange grid squares

JS8Call has a decent user base but its definitely not FT8 numbers, youre right about that. the sweet spot ive found is 40m in the evenings and sometimes 20m during the day if conditions are decent. the thing that took me a while to understand is that JS8Call is running at maybe -24dB SNR capability which is actually weaker than FT8 in terms of threshold, so you get contacts that PSK31 would never even decode. its slower though, like a full message exchange can take a couple minutes depending on the speed setting you pick

PSK31 is honestly still alive, especially on 14.070 on weekends. i fired it up a few months ago just to see and worked maybe 8 guys in an afternoon without trying hard. the decoder in fldigi is rock solid and there's something satisfying about watching that waterfall fill up with signals. for actual keyboard to keyboard conversation it still beats everything in my opinion just because the speed feels more natural

FT8 i use when i want to work a new entity or check if a band is open at all. its a propagation tool more than a communication tool at this point, which is fine, thats what it's good at

yeah JS8Call is fun but you kinda have to be patient with it. i tried it for a few weeks and the activity on 15m was pretty sparse, had better luck on 40 like you said. one thing i noticed is a lot of the JS8Call guys leave their stations in auto-respond mode so sometimes youre not even sure if theres a human on the other end or just a bot replying lol

RTTY is another one worth trying if you havent, especially around contest weekends. RTTY roundups get a ton of activity and the mode is ancient but it works. plus working some dx on RTTY feels different than FT8, more like you actually did something