so ive been on FT8 pretty heavily for the past year or so, mostly just hunting dx and filling in the map squares, but lately ive been feeling like it's kind of... hollow? like yeah i worked a bunch of new entities but the contacts themselves are completely meaningless, just signal reports and grid squares and thats it. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and said its basically FT8 under the hood but lets you actually type messages back and forth, still works at really low signal levels. been poking around at it and it seems interesting but im not sure if theres actually enough activity to make it worth setting up.

also while im at it i still have wsjt-x configured for FT4 which i mostly use during contests and that's been working fine, but i kind of miss the days when i was running PSK31 and actually talking to people, like full sentences and everything. does anybody actively run JS8Call on HF and is there a go-to frequency people hang out on? and does the software handle split and rig control the same way wsjt-x does because i really dont want to reconfigure everything from scratch if i can avoid it

yeah JS8Call is legit if you actually want to have a conversation at weak signal levels, i ran it for about six months mostly on 40m around 7.078 and there was decent activity in the evenings, not as busy as FT8 obviously but enough that you could usually find somebody to chat with. the software handles rig control pretty much the same way, uses hamlib just like wsjt-x so if your radio already works with that you're mostly good to go, you might need to tweak the audio levels a bit but nothing major.

the thing that got me back on PSK31 honestly was just missing proper back and forth conversation. JS8Call scratches that itch a little but the timing feels weird at first, like you have to get used to the fact that messages come through in chunks and theres always this slight delay. once you adjust to it though its actually pretty nice for what it is. i keep both running on different bands when conditions are decent.

i tried JS8Call maybe two years ago and didnt find a ton of activity but honestly that might have changed, the bands have been way better lately with the solar cycle picking up. one thing to watch out for is the different speed modes, normal vs fast vs turbo, faster modes obviously need better snr so if you're chasing the weak signal thing stick with the normal speed setting. i think the freqencies listed on the JS8Call website are still mostly accurate but 40m and 20m are your best bet.