so ive been running FT8 for about a year and a half now and yeah i get it, its great for weak signal dx and running up the entity count but honestly after a while it starts to feel like watching a spreadsheet update itself. you're not really talking to anybody.

started messing around with JS8Call a few weeks ago and its a completely different vibe. you can actually send real sentences, check in on nets, even do store-and-forward messaging which is kind of wild when you think about it. the tradeoff is obviously the sensitivity isn't quite as deep as FT8 since you're pushing actual text through the codec instead of just a fixed-format exchange. i think its like 10-12dB worse than FT8 depending on the speed setting you use.

my question is i guess — does anyone actually run JS8Call regularly and have a group or net they're part of? feels like most of the activity i see is just a few beacons and the occasional heartbeat message sitting there unresponded to. curious if theres a time of day or band where it actually gets lively or if im just missing where people hang out on it.

yeah JS8Call has kind of a chicken-and-egg problem honestly. the people who would love it most are the ones who gave up looking for activity and went back to FT8. there are a handful of nets though — the JS8Call net on 40m runs around 7.078 MHz and theres usually some activity there on weekend evenings at least in my experience. the @HB heartbeat groups can be pretty active too if you leave the software running, you start to see whos out there.

the store-and-forward relay stuff is what keeps me coming back. i had a message relayed through three intermediate stations to reach a buddy in the pacific northwest when 40m wasnt cooperating for us directly. that kind of thing doesnt happen in FT8. totally different purpose i think, people just keep comparing them because they look similar on the surface but they really arent trying to do the same thing.

i tried JS8Call for a bit but tbh my setup wasnt great at the time and i couldnt tell if the lack of responses was the mode or just my antenna situation. been meaning to revisit it. does it play nice with a modest station or do you really need solid signal levels to get anything going