so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is honestly kind of mind blowing when you first see it work, pulled a ZL station once on 80mw into a random wire which still feels unreal. but after a while it starts to feel like im just exchanging signal reports with strangers and there's no actual... conversation happening you know? like it's almost more of a data collection activity than ham radio.

so somebody on my local repeater mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend. spent maybe 4 hours on 40m with it and i think i get what its trying to do but i had a really hard time finding activity. decoded a few stations but nobody responded to my CQ and i only saw maybe 2 or 3 exchanges happening in the whole session. is the JS8Call community just that small or am i looking at the wrong bands or times? i was on 7.078 which i thought was the standard frequency.

also somewhat related — does anyone still run PSK31 regularly? i used to love it back like 15 years ago, felt like the perfect middle ground between cw and phone, and i occasionally see it on the waterfall but activity seems pretty thin compared to what it used to be. feels like FT8 kind of ate everything else's lunch.

yeah JS8Call activity is definitely thinner than FT8 but its not dead, you just have to know when to look. i find 40m in the evenings (my local evening, so like 0100-0300z) has the most going on, and there's a pretty active group on 20m during the day too, around 14.078. the thing that helped me was joining the JS8Call groups.io list because people actually announce when they're going to be on and sometimes coordinate skeds.

the other thing is JS8Call has these 'heartbeat' and relay features that make it more of a mesh-ish network thing than a point to point qso mode, so sometimes you're seeing traffic that's being relayed through other stations and it looks quieter than it is. its a totally different operating philosophy from FT8 and once that clicks it gets more interesting. i've had some genuinely good ragchews through it, like actual back and forth about antennas and stuff, which you're never gonna get from FT8's 15 second slots.

and yeah PSK31 is pretty much on life support at this point, which is sad. i still call CQ on 14.070 occasionally and sometimes get an answer but it's nothing like 2008-2012 when that whole slice of spectrum was just wall to wall signals. FT8 absolutely wrecked it.

80mw into a random wire and you worked ZL?? what band was that on, curious what the propagation was doing. ive been trying to figure out if my efhw is actually as bad as i think it is or if i just have bad luck with paths to the pacific.

on the JS8Call thing i cant really help much ive only fired it up once and got confused by the interface and gave up honestly. might try again after reading this thread