so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for getting contacts and watching the band conditions but honestly it feels like just clicking buttons and watching callsigns pop up. theres not really any operating going on, you know what i mean? someone mentioned JS8Call to me at the club meeting last month and i finally got around to installing it this weekend.

first impression is that its way slower obviously, like you really notice the difference once youre used to FT8 snapping through a full exchange in 90 seconds. but i actually talked to a guy in colorado for like 20 minutes about his antenna setup and it felt like actual radio again. propagation was rough too, 40m was a mess saturday night, and we were still completing sentences at pretty terrible SNR, i think i was seeing him around -18 or so at points.

my question is really whether people actually use JS8Call regularly or if its one of those things everyone installs and then forgets about. also curious if anyone runs PSK31 still. i have a feeling i know the answer but my elmers back in the day were big PSK31 guys and i have some nostalgia for it even though i never really got into it myself before FT8 kind of took over everything.

JS8Call is genuinely underrated and i think a lot of people dismiss it just because FT8 is flashier in terms of raw contact rate. the relay/store-forward stuff is actually really clever for marginal paths. i run it on 40 and 80 pretty regularly, mostly late evenings, and theres usually a handful of people around who actually want to chat rather than just log a grid square.

PSK31 is not dead but its definitely thinned out. i still check 14.070 sometimes out of habit and you do see activity especially on weekends but its nothing like it was ten years ago. the thing about PSK31 that FT8 cant replace is that you can actually type in real time, like freeform conversation, and the waterfall on a good decoder is still honestly beautiful to watch when theres a bunch of stations on. weak signal wise though FT8 and even JS8Call will walk all over it, PSK31 needs a decent signal to be reliable whereas JS8Call will crawl through at SNR levels that would make PSK31 completely unreadable.

if you want the conversation feel without giving up too much weak signal performance JS8Call is probably your best bet right now. WSPR is interesting too but thats not really conversation territory obviously.

been meaning to try JS8Call for ages, you might have just pushed me to actually do it. i mostly do FT4 and FT8 during contests and the occasional RTTY contest but yeah the whole thing does feel a bit robotic after a while. RTTY at least feels like youre actually typing something even if its just 599 TU over and over during a contest run haha.