so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for racking up contacts and getting grid squares but lately its been feeling kind of hollow you know, like youre just exchanging signal reports with a robot. heard about JS8Call from a guy at the club meeting last month and started poking around with it this week.

the basic idea makes sense to me — its built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 so you get a lot of that noise floor magic but the messages are freeform text so you can actually talk to someone. the tradeoff is obviously the speed and i guess bandwidth in a way. JS8Call messages take longer and you lose some of that extreme sensitivity that makes FT8 so stupid good at pulling signals out of nowhere.

im running a G90 into a random wire up about 25 feet with a 9:1 unun, so not a great antenna situation, and i was curious if people have had luck with JS8Call when the signals are marginal. like does the extra symbol time actually help enough on a compromise antenna setup or am i going to be frustrated watching half my messages fail to decode. also is there still an active userbase on JS8Call or did everyone just go back to FT8 after the novelty wore off. seems like every digital mode eventually loses people to FT8.

not trying to abandon FT8 entirely just wondering if JS8Call fills a different niche or if its kind of redundant

JS8Call is definitely a different animal and yeah there's still activity on it, maybe not FT8 levels obviously but there's a core group that uses it regularly especially on 40m. i use it mostly for the relay/store-forward stuff which is actually pretty clever for emcomm type scenarios but thats a whole other topic.

on the sensitivity question — JS8Call normal mode runs at about -24dB SNR threshold which isnt far off from FT8's -21 or whatever it is, so you're not giving up as much as you'd think. there's also a slow mode that does better than that if conditions are really rough. with your setup honestly youll probably be fine for regional stuff, the random wire with a 9:1 works well enough on 40m in my experience. the bigger issue is that JS8Call QSOs take time, like even a short exchange is several minutes and if the band shifts or fades you lose the thread of the conversation. FT8 gets in and out so fast that a fade just means you retry, with JS8 youre waiting and waiting and then sometimes nothing.

the social side is real though. had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Wyoming last winter about antenna theory and it was genuinely fun in a way no FT8 contact has ever been. so yeah i think they fill different niches, its not redundant at all.

honestly i tried JS8Call for like two weeks and went back to FT8, but mostly because my operating time is limited and i wanted to actually log contacts efficiently. if you have time to sit and chat it seems cool. the UI felt a little cluttered to me compared to WSJT-X but that might just be learning curve thing

one thing nobody mentioned — PSK31 still has some activity and if youre looking for keyboard-to-keyboard ragchew that works on weak signals it's worth checking out on 40m around 7.070 or so. not as resilient as JS8 but the rhythm of it feels more like a real conversation cadence if that makes sense. anyway just throwing that out there