so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for getting contacts logged especially when the bands are being weird but honestly the 15 second sequence thing gets old when you just want to have an actual conversation with somebody. heard about JS8Call a while back and finally installed it last weekend and i gotta say the learning curve is steeper than i expected.

my question is really whether people actually use it regularly for like actual back and forth conversation or is it mostly just empty frequencies with the occasional beacon. i can see the appeal in theory — basically PSK31 speeds but with the weak signal performance closer to FT8, right? or am i misunderstanding how it works under the hood.

for context im running an ic-7300 into a trapped vertical, usually on 40m or 20m, and my noise floor at the home QTH is pretty rough so weak signal stuff matters a lot to me. tried PSK31 years ago and loved the conversational aspect but even with a decent signal it felt fragile compared to what FT8 does in the mud. so anyway is JS8Call actually being used or did everyone just go back to FT8 and call it a day

JS8Call does have an active community but its definitely not FT8 numbers, not even close. the 40m JS8Call calling frequency gets some traffic especially evenings in north america and theres a loose group that does store-and-forward relay stuff which is honestly pretty cool if you're into that side of things. for actual ragchewing though its hit or miss — sometimes you'll find someone and have a solid 20 minute back and forth, other times you sit there watching the waterfall for an hour and nothing.

your read on the weak signal performance is basically right. JS8Call uses a slower version of the FT8 waveform so you get that coding gain but at the cost of bandwidth and speed. its more like a 25hz wide signal depending on the speed setting you use. normal speed is fine for most stuff but if the band is really in the toilet you can drop to slow mode and it gets almost ridiculous how weak a signal it can pull out. i've decoded stations on 40m that were genuinely inaudible to me.

the ic-7300 works great for it btw, same USB audio setup as WSJT-X basically. dont overthink the configuration side of it.

honestly i bounce between all of them depending on what im trying to do. FT8 when i just want to work something and log it, JS8Call when i actually feel like talking to a human being, and i still fire up RTTY occasionally during contests because thats just fun in a masochistic kind of way.

PSK31 isnt totally dead either, there's still some activity on 20m around 14.070 most afternoons if the band cooperates. its just much thinner than it used to be. i miss the early 2000s PSK31 scene honestly, felt like everyone and their dog was running it for a while there.