so ive been running FT8 for about two years now mostly on 20m and 40m and its great for what it is, racking up contacts and all that, but lately ive been reading about JS8Call and the whole store-and-forward mesh relay thing and im honestly not sure if its solving a problem i have or just a cool idea in theory

my setup is nothing special, IC-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, running WSJT-X with a SignaLink and i get decent results even when the band sounds completely dead. but JS8Call seems like it requires more of a active community presence for it to actually be useful, like if nobody is on in your region its kind of pointless right? at least with FT8 theres always somebody in the log

i also messed around with PSK31 back in the day and honestly kind of miss it, felt more like actually talking to someone even though the SNR performance is nowhere near FT8. anyway curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its mostly just guys experimenting and then going back to FT8

JS8Call gets used a lot more than you'd think but you have to go looking for it. the 40m JS8 calling frequencies are actually pretty active in the evenings especially around 7.078, and there are some nets that run it regularly for actual message passing not just signal reports. the relay thing really does work, i passed a message through three intermediate stations once just to test it and it got there fine.

that said you're not wrong that the FT8 ecosystem is just massive by comparison. JS8Call is more interesting to me personally because it lets you actually have a conversation, even if its slow and awkward. i think of FT8 as a propagation tool that also happens to log contacts and JS8Call as something closer to actual communication. they're not really competing in my head anymore

PSK31 nostalgia is real though. i still fire it up occasionally on 14.070 when the bands are decent. not many takers but the ones who are there usually wanna ragchew which is nice

honestly the JS8Call activity on 20m has been kinda dissapointing in my experience, tried it for a few weeks and the waterfall was pretty quiet most of the time. maybe im on at the wrong times or the frequency offsets i was checking werent right idk. didnt help that i couldnt figure out if my audio levels were set correctly, the whole setup felt fiddly compared to just letting WSJT-X do its thing