so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and the log fills up fast but honestly it feels more like a video game than ham radio sometimes. like you're just clicking buttons and watching callsigns appear. anyway a buddy from my club mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend and it seems way more interesting but my question is — is anyone actually using it regularly? i fired it up on 40m saturday afternoon and saw maybe a dozen stations in the activity window but most of them werent responding to anything, just beaconing. tried calling CQ for like 45 minutes and got one reply from a guy in ohio who then disappeared after one exchange.

i get that its weaker signal capability than FT8 because of the longer tone spacing or whatever but the tradeoff of being able to actually type a message seems worth it to me. does it have like designated calling frequencies the way FT8 does? im on 7.078 which i think is right but maybe thats the problem. also does anyone run PSK31 still? i used to love that mode back in 2009 or so and it felt more like actually talking to someone than anything ive tried since

yeah JS8Call is kind of a ghost town most of the time unless you hit it at the right moment. the activity tends to cluster on weekends and there are some nets that run on it — worth checking the JS8Call groups.io list because people post schedules there. 7.078 is correct for 40m. the beaconing thing is just how a lot of people run it, they leave it on in the background and only check in occasionally so dont take the non-responses personally.

and yes PSK31 still exists but its hanging on by a thread. 14.070 on 20m you'll still find people on weekend mornings, mostly older ops who never switched to FT8. the thing i always liked about PSK31 was you could actually ragchew, carry on a real back and forth for 20 minutes. FT8 is great for what it does but youre right that its basically just an automated logbook filler. i run FT8 when conditions are rough and i want to work something, i run JS8Call when i actually want to interact with a human being.

RTTY is still my go-to for contesting honestly, CQWW RTTY fills up the bands every year and the rates you can get are surprisingly good even compared to FT8 in a contest context. but for weak signal ragchewing JS8Call is pretty underrated. the -24dB floor isnt quite as low as FT8 but its close enough and at least you can tell someone your antenna situation without having to encode it in a macro

one thing that helped me find activity was just leaving JS8Call running overnight on 40m with the beacon on. by morning i usually had a few messages sitting there from guys on the other side of the country or occasionally europe. its more of an async thing than real time i think, kind of like a very slow text message system which is either cool or annoying depending on your mood