so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and all that but honestly it feels like shouting into a void sometimes. you make the contact, log it, and thats it. no actual exchange happening. heard about JS8Call from a guy at the club last month and been poking at it for a few weeks.

the concept is cool — its basically built on the same weak signal encoding as FT8 but stretched out so you can actually type back and forth with someone. latency is kind of brutal though, like 15 seconds per transmission depending on the speed setting you pick. normal mode is painfully slow if youre used to FT4 or even PSK31 speeds. but it does work crazy well on marginal paths where PSK31 would just fall apart.

im on 40m mostly, running an IC-7300 into a wire dipole up about 30 feet. nothing fancy. JS8Call decodes stuff i would never even hear on SSB and the store-and-forward relay stuff is interesting if a bit complicated to wrap your head around at first. curious if anyone here actually uses it regularly or if its mostly just experimenters dabbling. also wondering how it compares to just using RTTY for ragchewing since some guys in the group still swear by RTTY for actual back and forth exchanges.

JS8Call is genuinely underrated but you're right that the speed thing takes getting used to. I run it on 40 and 80m and once you stop expecting it to be like a chat app it gets more enjoyable. the turbo mode helps a little but you lose some of the weak signal margin that makes it useful in the first place so it kind of defeats the purpose.

RTTY for ragchewing is honestly still pretty solid if the band is cooperating, it needs a much better signal than JS8 to be readable and you lose it fast when conditions drop. i was running RTTY on 15m last winter during a good opening and had a 20 minute back and forth with a station in Bulgaria which was great, but theres no way that path would have held up for JS8 normal mode timing wise, conditions were moving too fast. so i think they serve different use cases more than one replacing the other.

the store and forward relay thing in JS8 is really where it shines for anything emcomm adjacent, being able to leave a message that another station relays on is actually useful not just a gimmick.

honestly i tried JS8Call twice and both times i couldnt get the audio levels right and it kept showing weird decode errors that FT8 never gave me on the same setup. might have been a VAC issue i never bothered to track down. went back to FT8 mostly. PSK31 is what i use when i actually want to talk to someone, theres still activity on 20m around 14.070 and the software is pretty mature at this point. not as weak-signal capable obviously but if the band is even halfway decent it works fine and you can actually have a real exchange at a normal typing pace