so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working new entities but honestly it feels more like a video game than radio sometimes. you click a callsign, the software does everything, you log a contact with someone you never actually talked to. i dont know, maybe im being a snob about it.

anyway i stumbled onto JS8Call a few months back and the concept seemed cool — basically the FT8 weak signal magic but you can actually type back and forth with someone. been trying to get it set up properly on my IC-7300 with the built in USB audio and it mostly works but i keep seeing decode errors on my end even when the SNR looks fine. running WSJT-X for FT8 on the same setup with zero issues so its something specific to JS8Call i think. anyone else notice the decode threshold is noticeably worse than FT8? feels like i need a stronger signal to get a clean decode

also is there even enough activity on JS8Call to make it worthwhile or is it kind of a ghost town these days

the decode sensitivity thing is real — JS8Call isnt as optimized as FT8 because its doing more work essentially, the protocol has to handle free-form text instead of a fixed message structure so yeah you give up some dB of margin. i think ive seen numbers thrown around like 3-4dB worse than FT8 but dont quote me on that. for what its worth i run it on 40m mostly and theres a small but pretty consistent group of people on there, especially in the evenings. 7.078 is the usual spot. its not wall to wall signals like FT8 but the conversations are actually real which for me justifies the lower activity. i had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Finland last winter about antenna matching which would literally be impossible on FT8.

for your decode issues try bumping the audio level down a bit if you havent already. overdriving the input even slightly seems to trash the decodes way more on JS8Call than WSJT-X in my experience. might not be your issue but worth checking before you dig deeper

honestly i felt the same way about FT8 after a while. the JS8Call activity isnt huge but the people who are on it tend to actually want to operate if that makes sense. i've had good luck on 20m during the day too not just 40m. the relay/store-forward stuff is kinda neat conceptually even if i haven't really used it in anger yet.