so ive been running FT8 for about a year and a half now and honestly it scratches the DX itch fine but theres something that started feeling hollow about it after a while. like yeah i worked 140 countries and the waterfall looks cool but its basically just an automated exchange, you're not really talking to anyone.

a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and i installed it last weekend and started poking around on 40m. the concept makes sense to me — its built on the same weak signal encoding as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, slower but workable. had a 20 minute QSO with a guy in Georgia (the country, not the state) running 5 watts into a dipole and the signal was way down in the mud on regular SSB but JS8 was decoding fine.

my question is — does anyone actually use JS8Call regularly or is it kind of a ghost town on most bands? i checked pskreporter and there seem to be spots but not a ton of activity compared to FT8. also wondering if there's some setting im missing because my auto-relay stuff doesnt seem to be working right, messages are going out but not getting forwarded the way i expected.

not trying to abandon FT8 just want something with a little more actual communication going on. PSK31 used to be that for me before FT8 kind of ate the digital world.

JS8Call is definitely not dead but you gotta know where to look. 40m is hit or miss depending on time of day, i've had better luck on 20m in the evenings especially around 14.078. there's a loose community of people that check in on JS8 regularly, you just might not see the traffic because they're running low duty cycle or leaving the radio on in relay mode without actually sitting there.

the relay thing — make sure you have RELAY enabled in the settings and also that you're not accidentally filtering out relay messages in your inbox. theres a checkbox that a lot of people miss. also the heartbeat interval matters, if you set it too long you'll miss the window when someone is listening. i run mine at like 15 minutes or so.

and yeah i know exactly what you mean about FT8 feeling hollow. i still use it for chasing DX but JS8 is where i actually have conversations anymore. had a long ragchew with a guy in New Zealand last winter that took like 45 minutes total because propagation kept fading but we just waited it out and kept going. that doesnt happen on FT8.

psk31 was so good for that kind of casual conversation thing. i kind of miss when 20m had a constant stream of PSK31 QSOs going on a friday night. FT8 really did just vacuum up all those ops. i still fire up fldigi sometimes just to see if anyones around on PSK and occasionally you find a pocket of activity, usually older guys who never switched over.

havent tried JS8Call myself but this thread is making me want to. does it work okay with a regular soundcard setup or do you need anything special interface wise