so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but it feels like operating a slot machine more than actual ham radio if im being honest. someone on the club reflector mentioned JS8Call and i downloaded it last week and have been poking around but im having trouble understanding the workflow compared to WSJT-X

like in FT8 the whole thing is automated enough that i can walk away and come back and see what got logged. JS8Call seems like it wants you to actually be there, which is fine, but the timing windows and the relay stuff is confusing me. i set it up on 40m around 7.078 and i can see activity in the waterfall but half the time my transmissions dont seem to get responded to

also been messing with PSK31 a bit, fired up fldigi and worked a few guys in europe on 20m last weekend which was satisfying in a completely different way than FT8. feels more like a real QSO. anyway not really a specific question just wondering what other people use these modes for and if JS8Call is worth sticking with or if im just doing it wrong

JS8Call is a different animal for sure. the thing people miss is it's not really designed to be a contact-logging machine like FT8, it's more like a slow chatty text mode with some store-and-forward capability. the relay stuff is actually pretty cool once you get it — i've had messages get passed through 3 or 4 stations to reach someone who was only semi-reachable from my QTH

the 40m calling frequency you're on is right, though honestly activity seems to have drifted around a bit depending on time of day and what part of the world you're trying to reach. i find it more active on 20m during my morning greyline window. the lack of response might just be propagation or timing, not you doing anything wrong. give it another week or two of regular monitoring and you'll start to get a feel for when the band is populated with JS8 traffic

PSK31 is honestly underrated these days. yes it needs more signal than FT8 to decode but there's something satisfying about a real back and forth with someone, even if it's just signal reports and weather. i still fire up fldigi on slow evenings

yeah FT8 slot machine is exactly how i describe it to people lol. i stuck with it long enough to hit 100 entities confirmed but after that i kinda lost interest. tried RTTY contesting for a while which scratched the digital itch in a more active way — nothing like a pile up in RTTY to make you feel like youre actually operating

never got deep into JS8Call but from what i understand your issue might be that not many people are monitoring it actively, so you can be calling into a void for a while. its more of a slow net type thing i think