so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly it scratches the DX itch pretty well but theres something that bugs me about it — like yeah i worked 87 countries and whatever but i never actually talked to anyone. its just grid squares and signal reports flying around and you close WSJT-X feeling like you ran a database query not had a QSO.

anyway somebody at my club mentioned JS8Call a few months back and i finally got around to setting it up last weekend. its basically running on top of the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff, even do store-and-forward messaging which is kind of wild. the tradeoff is its slower obviously and the band has to cooperate a bit more but on 40m last night i had like a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in New Mexico and it felt more like ham radio to me than anything ive done in a while.

my question is whether anyone is running both regularly or if you kind of pick one and stick with it. also curious if the JS8Call nets are actually active enough to be worth monitoring — i havent found a ton of activity on 20m during the day. the heartbeat stuff is cool but only if theres people sending them

yeah i run both, keep WSJT-X open on one radio and JS8Call on another when i can. FT8 is basically just a point scoring thing at this point, nothing wrong with that but you nailed it — its not a conversation. JS8Call has a totally different feel. slower yes, and you do need a reasonably clean signal path or the decodes get choppy, but when it works its genuinely satisfying.

activity on 20m can be hit or miss depending on time of day. i find the 14.078 spot has decent traffic in the early evening UTC, and 40m overnight is usually pretty good in North America. the relay and aprs-like messaging stuff is where it gets interesting if you want to do something more than ragchew — ive seen people use it for lightweight emcomm stuff and it makes a lot of sense for that. not as fast as packet but way more robust on marginal paths. worth keeping in the rotation for sure, just dont expect it to replace FT8 for working new entities or anything like that

honestly same experience here. i tried JS8Call for a few weeks and liked it but the activity in my region was just really sparse, kept calling CQ and getting nothing back for like an hour at a time. might depend a lot on where you are. i drifted back to FT8 mostly because at least something always happens when you turn it on. still have JS8Call installed though, might fire it back up and give it another shot on 40m like you mentioned