so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and seeing how far out you can get with low power but honestly after a while it starts to feel like im just exchanging signal reports with robots. like theres no actual communication happening, you just click a callsign and the software does everything.

so i started poking around JS8Call which is supposed to give you like a messaging capability on top of the weak signal stuff and i set it up last weekend and honestly im a little confused by the interface. like i get the basic idea, its built on top of WSJT-X style decoding but you can type actual messages and relay through other stations and stuff. but when i tuned around 14.078 i was seeing a bunch of activity but i couldn't figure out if people were just calling CQ or actually in the middle of conversations. the SNR reports it was decoding were wild, like -18 dB stuff, which is cool.

anyway my actual question is whether JS8Call has enough of an active user base to make it worth spending time on or is it kind of a ghost town outside of certain hours. also does anyone run both on different VFOs or rigs simultaneously, i have an IC-7300 and a spare FT-891 just sitting there.

JS8Call is definitely more of a niche thing compared to FT8 but its not dead by any means. 14.078 and 7.078 both have reasonable activity, just not the wall to wall signals you see on the FT8 frequencies. the thing that trips people up at first is that JS8Call has these different speed modes, normal, slow, fast, turbo, and stations running different speeds can't decode each other so sometimes youll see signals but they wont decode because they're on a different mode speed than you. worth checking that first.

as for running two rigs simultaneously yeah i do exactly that, FT8 on my main rig and JS8Call on a second radio. just make sure your audio interfaces dont fight each other and use separate instances of everything. the 7300's built in USB audio makes this pretty easy since it shows up as its own device. the 891 will need a SignaLink or something similar unless you're going CAT and audio through a different interface.

once you get the hang of JS8Call the store and forward messaging thing is actually pretty cool for emcomm type scenarios. not saying thats why you'd use it but it gives the mode a purpose beyond just seeing how weak a signal you can decode.

yeah FT8 gets tedious fast if you actually want to talk to somebody. i went through the same thing. personally i went back to PSK31 for actual ragchewing on digital, its old school but people on there tend to actually be interested in a QSO not just a signal report. 14.070 still has guys on it most evenings, slower crowd but thats not a bad thing.

never got super deep into JS8Call but i messed with it during a field day type thing and it seemed solid for what it is.