so ive been running FT8 pretty heavily for the past year or so, got a decent log going, worked a bunch of DX on 40 and 20m with pretty modest power (running about 25w into a dipole up maybe 30 feet). its been great for propagation monitoring and just racking up contacts but honestly after a while it starts to feel a little... hollow? like youre not really talking to anyone, just exchanging grid squares and signal reports and thats it.

anyway i started poking around with JS8Call and the concept is really interesting to me — using the same WSJT-style weak signal encoding but actually being able to type messages back and forth. the latency is kind of brutal though, like a full exchange can take a few minutes and if the band shifts mid-QSO you just lose it. has anyone stuck with it long enough to find a regular group or net to work with? feels like the activity level is pretty sparse compared to FT8 on a busy evening.

also curious how it compares to just running PSK31 which i used to do a lot back in the day. PSK31 you could actually have a real chat but you needed maybe 10-15dB more signal to make it work reliably. is JS8Call actually filling that middle ground or am i just romanticizing it

yeah the hollow feeling with FT8 is real, i hit that wall maybe 6 months in. JS8Call is genuinely different in feel but youre right that the activity is patchy. i check 14.078 most weekend mornings and can usually find a few guys chatting, there's also a handful of nets that run on 40m in the evenings depending on your timezone. the store-and-forward relay stuff is actually pretty clever once you dig into it.

the latency thing you just kind of accept after a while. its not a phone call its more like... a very slow text message conversation. once i reframed it that way it stopped bothering me. and yeah compared to PSK31 the weak signal advantage is real, ive completed JS8 QSOs when PSK31 would have been totally unreadable, the waterfall just doesnt lie. that said i still fire up PSK31 occasionally when the band is good and i want to actually type fast and have something close to a normal conversation. different tools for different moods honestly.

RTTY guy here mostly but i mess with JS8Call sometimes. the thing that got me was finding out you can run store-and-forward messages through other stations even if theyre not online at the same time, thats kind of wild when you think about it for emergency or low infrastructure stuff. not sure it totally replaces anything but its a neat trick. my issue is my logging software doesnt play nice with it so i never really know whats in my log from those sessions lol