so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and seeing what the bands doing but honestly after a while it feels like just watching a database fill up. you exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats... it. not really a QSO in any meaningful sense to me anyway.

someone on a local net mentioned JS8Call and i downloaded it last week and have been poking around. the interface is a little rough and it took me a while to figure out the heartbeat messaging stuff but once i got it i kind of liked the idea of it. managed to have an actual back and forth with a guy in colorado about his antenna setup which was cool, felt more like a real contact.

my question is basically does anyone run both regularly and how do you decide which to use. also is JS8Call activity concentrated on certain frequencies or does it vary a lot by band. ive only seen it really busy on 40m so far but maybe im just not looking at the right times. and does the relay/store-forward stuff actually work reliably or is it more of a proof of concept thing at this point

yeah i use both, pretty different tools honestly. FT8 is good for what it is — if i want to work a new country or just check propagation its unbeatable, -20dB signals actually decoding is still kind of magic to me even after all this time. but JS8Call scratches a different itch. its more like what PSK31 used to be back in the day before FT8 ate everything, you could actually have a conversation with someone instead of just swapping signal reports.

activity on JS8Call tends to cluster on 40m around 7.078 and 20m around 14.078 give or take, and theres a normal speed and a fast mode so worth checking both. the relay stuff does work, ive seen messages get passed through intermediary stations and arrive which is kind of neat for emcomm types but day to day its not something i rely on. honestly just get on there in the evenings and hang out, its a smaller community so people actually respond when they see a CQ

I came at this from the opposite direction — started on JS8Call because a friend got me into it before I ever really did FT8 seriously. Then I got into FT8 for contesting and chasing DX. Honestly I keep both in rotation but for totally different reasons. JS8Call is almost more like a slow chat mode than a traditional weak signal mode if that makes sense, the weak signal capability is there but most people arent running crazy low power on it, theyre just using it because they want more than a grid exchange. The store-forward relay is real and it does work but you need enough active nodes in the path which on a slow day can be hit or miss. Dont give up on it if the first few sessions are quiet, theres definitely a community there its just smaller and more spread out than the FT8 crowd.