so ive been running FT8 for about 8 months now and i get it, its great for the quick contact and the DX you can work is insane compared to anything else ive tried on HF. but it always kind of felt hollow to me, like i worked a guy in Kazakhstan and then... thats it. no exchange, nothing. just signal reports and grid squares.

a buddy at my club mentioned JS8Call and said its basically the same weak signal thing but you can actually type back and forth like a real QSO. so i downloaded it and set it up last weekend. and yeah its genuinely pretty cool. slower obviously but you can actually have a conversation. worked a few guys on 40m in the evening and we talked about antennas and weather and whatever for like 20 minutes. felt way more like ham radio to me personally.

anyway my question is more about the technical side of it. is JS8Call actually as sensitive as FT8 or is it a compromise because of the longer messages? i know FT8 can pull stuff out of the noise that you just cannot hear at all, wondering if JS8 gives that up to allow the free-text format. also curious if anyone runs both simultaneously on different bands or is that asking for trouble with the sound card setup.

JS8Call is definitely not as sensitive as FT8, thats just the nature of the encoding. FT8 gets away with those insane SNR numbers because every single transmission is a fixed-length structured message and the decoder knows exactly what to expect. JS8Call has to handle arbitrary text so the FEC cant be as aggressive. from what i remember reading it's something like 10-12dB worse than FT8 at the threshold, which in practice means it works great for regional stuff and even some DX under decent conditions but you wont be pulling -24dB signals out of the mud like you can with FT8.

that said for what you're describing, actual conversations, the sensitivity is usually plenty. you're not trying to work a VP6 through aurora, you just want to chat with someone in the next state or across an ocean on a decent day. it handles that fine in my experience. i run both but on different bands and different instances of wsjt-x vs the js8call software, never had a problem with that as long as youre using separate audio devices or a virtual audio cable routed right.

yeah the FT8 hollow feeling is real and i think a lot of people get burnt out on it for exactly that reason. i went through a phase where i was just grinding DXCC and then one day i realized i hadnt actually talked to anyone in like three months of operating. switched over to PSK31 for a while which is even older but theres still a decent community on 20m if you know where to look, around 14.070 give or take. slower than FT8 obviously but the conversations are real and some of those ops have been on PSK since like 2001 and they know everything.

havent tried JS8Call much myself, maybe i should give it another shot. last time i tried it the band i was on was pretty dead but thats probably just timing.