so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly after a while it feels like youre just clicking a waterfall and not actually talking to anyone. i get that thats kind of the point but i started getting curious about JS8Call because people kept mentioning it in the weak signal context and i figured it was basically the same thing but with text.

turns out its actually pretty different in practice. the timing structure is more relaxed, you can send longer messages, and theres this store-and-forward relay thing that i still dont fully understand but it seems like guys are using it for some kind of resilient messaging network? anyway i set it up on my IC-7300 with the usual USB audio and CAT stuff i already had running for WSJT-X and it came up pretty easy.

my question is more about the activity levels though. i tune around on 40m and sometimes the JS8Call frequencies feel pretty dead compared to the FT8 circus. is it just time of day or is the mode genuinely less populated in certain regions. also curious if anyone actually has conversations on it or if its mostly just beacon-type stuff

yeah the activity thing is real, JS8Call never really hit the critical mass that FT8 did and i think part of that is because FT8 kind of ate everything. but there ARE people on there, you just have to know when to look. i find 40m in the evenings (local time) has some decent activity and 20m during the day can surprise you. the store-forward stuff you mentioned is called the heartbeat relay network and basically nodes can pass messages along even when youre not directly connected, its pretty clever for emcomm use cases.

the ragchew aspect is genuinely better than FT8 once you find someone to talk to. its not PSK31 or anything but you can actually exchange more than a signal report and a grid square which is refreshing. i still run FT8 for DX chasing but JS8Call scratches a different itch. patience is kind of required though.

honestly i tried JS8Call for about two weeks and went back to a mix of FT8 and just... plain old PSK31 when i want to actually type at someone. PSK31 is ancient at this point but theres still a small community and the fldigi interface just works, i know it cold. JS8Call felt a bit clunky to me but i might have been doing it wrong, the UI is not exactly intuitive out of the box