so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is just stupid good, worked a ZL station last week on 20m with like -18dB SNR which still blows my mind. but the whole thing feels like watching a slot machine. you click a callsign, exchange grid squares, 73, done. theres no... conversation.

someone in my local club mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically FT8 but you could actually type messages back and forth. so i installed it and have been poking around on 40m mostly but i cant really figure out if anyone is actually using it for ragchews or if its just people sending automated heartbeat beacons at each other. the waterfall looks busy enough but every time i try to call CQ i get nothing or just an automated ping back from someones node.

is there like a specific time or freq people actually hang out on JS8Call and hold real QSOs? or is the mode just kinda dying out? also wondering how the weak signal performance compares to FT8 since i assume the longer transmit windows hurt you there. my setup is nothing special, IC-7300 and a dipole up about 30 feet.

JS8Call is definitely slower to decode than FT8 because the symbol rate is lower and the messages are freeform so there's more overhead, but you can still pull it out of the noise pretty well — I'd say maybe 3-4dB worse than FT8 at the threshold, roughly. Not a huge deal in practice.

As for activity, yeah it's thinner than FT8 but it's not dead. 40m around 7.078 seems to have the most going on in North America, at least in my experience. Evenings local time you'll usually find a few people actually chatting rather than just beaconing. The heartbeat thing can be annoying if that's all you see but once you get a real back and forth going it does feel more like an actual contact. I've had some decent 20 minute exchanges on there. Patience is kind of required though, not the instant gratification of FT8.

If you really want a conversational digital mode and weak signal isn't the main priority, PSK31 on a busy evening still works and feels way more natural to me personally. But JS8Call is worth sticking with for a few more sessions before writing it off.

i had the same frustration honestly. spent like two weeks just getting heartbeat replies from nodes and thought the mode was basically a zombie. then i stumbled into an actual group on 40m one sunday afternoon and it clicked. its like the difference between walking into a bar at 9am versus 9pm lol.

also fwiw i switched from FT8 to mostly JS8Call and some RTTY for contesting and i dont really miss the grid square grind. RTTY still has a weirdly active contest scene if you havent tried it, feels old school in a good way.