so ive been on FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for contacts and the waterfall is satisfying to watch but after a while it just feels like a robotic logging exercise. someone told me about JS8Call a while back and i finally sat down and tried it this weekend and honestly its kind of blowing my mind a little bit

the idea that you can actually type back and forth with someone on like -15dB SNR is kind of wild to me. i ran a QSO with a guy in finland from my attic dipole running 25 watts and we were actually talking about his antenna setup, not just exchanging grid squares and signal reports. felt more like actual radio to me

my question is whether people mostly use JS8Call on 40m or is 20m the more active band for it. i checked the usual dial frequencies and 40m seemed pretty dead when i was looking but maybe i had the wrong time of day. also curious if anyone uses it for emcomm stuff because from what i can tell the store-and-forward messaging thing would be pretty useful in a grid-down situation, but i dont fully understand how that part works yet

JS8Call on 40m is honestly hit or miss depending on time of day and where you are. i find 20m (14.078 MHz is the main watering hole) is way more active during the day, then 40m picks up in the evening when the band shifts. theres also some activity on 80m late night if you want to work more regional stuff

the store and forward thing is called relay messaging and its actually pretty clever — if you're offline another station can hold a message for you and deliver it when you check in. ive seen our local ARES group mess around with it and it works better than i expected for a peer to peer thing with no infrastructure. the heartbeat feature where stations periodically beacon their grid is useful too for just knowing whos out there without anyone actively calling

fair warning the software can be a little quirky, make sure you're on a recent build and watch your audio levels. if you're driving it too hard the decode rate goes in the toilet same as any other weak signal mode

yeah FT8 always felt like a video game to me more than radio, i know thats a controversial opinion on here lol. i went back to PSK31 for a while just to have real keyboard to keyboard QSOs but the bands have to be in decent shape for that obviously. JS8Call splits the difference pretty well i think, slow enough to punch through noise but you can still have an actual exchange

havent tried the emcomm angle but that relay/store forward stuff does sound interesting for ARES use