so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but every time i try to actually talk to someone its just the standard exchange and done. i get it thats kind of the point. but lately ive been reading about JS8Call and it seems like the idea is you can have a real QSO using the same weak signal tech underneath it.

tried it last weekend on 40m and the waterfall looked completely dead compared to what FT8 looks like. maybe 3 or 4 signals visible the whole session. so my question is — is JS8Call just not popular enough to be usable or am i looking at the wrong times, wrong bands? i was on around 7.078 which i think is the standard dial freq but honestly not sure if thats even right anymore.

also still have WSJT-X running on the side and i noticed my FT8 decode rate dropped a bit, guessing thats a cpu thing. running on a pretty old laptop. anyway the main thing is i want to know if JS8Call is worth sticking with or if its kind of a dead end activity wise

JS8Call is definitely less populated than FT8 but its not dead, you just have to know when to look. 40m is actually decent but i've had better luck on 20m during the afternoon, roughly 14.078. there's also a small but pretty active group that uses it for keyboard-to-keyboard rag chewing, which is honestly what drew me to it in the first place. the whole point is you dont need a full signal to copy each other which is nice when conditions are marginal.

7.078 is correct for 40m so you had the right frequency. might just be a timing thing. also the heartbeat feature where stations beacon automatically helps a lot for finding activity — if you havent turned that on yet its worth doing, basically lets you see whos around without them having to actively transmit a message.

yeah the cpu thing is real, i had the same issue running two WSJT-X instances on an old thinkpad. eventually just set up a cheap mini PC dedicated to digital stuff and that solved it. js8call does run a bit heavier than ft8 because of all the extra framing i think.

honestly though i still go back to PSK31 when i want an actual conversation. i know thats kind of old fashioned at this point but theres still people on 14.070 area and the exchanges feel more like a real QSO. ft8 kind of ruined me for caring about signal reports because nobody actually means anything when they send you a -14