okay so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for working new countries and the SNR performance is honestly magic sometimes. pulled a ZL2 last week at like -21dB which i still cant quite believe. but theres something that bugs me about it — its not really a conversation right? its just exchanging callsigns and signal reports and then youre done. feels a little like a slot machine sometimes.

so i started poking around JS8Call because i heard it was built on the same engine basically, like the JS8 waveform is derived from FT8 but with longer transmit windows and you can actually type messages back and forth. been messing with it for a couple weeks and the activity on 40m seems decent enough, especially in the evenings. the relay/store-and-forward thing is interesting too.

my question is — for people who use both, is JS8Call worth putting real time into or is it kind of a niche thing that never really took off? and does anyone actually use it for emcomm type purposes or is that more theoretical at this point. my setup is pretty basic, IC-7300 into a fan dipole, running WSJT-X for FT8 and the JS8Call client for the other. audio interface is a SignaLink.

JS8Call is genuinely underrated imo. yeah the user base is smaller than FT8 but that almost makes it better for actual ragchewing because the people on there actually want to talk. ive had 20 minute back and forth conversations on 40m that would have been completely impossible on FT8. the heartbeat feature where your station can auto-respond even when youre not at the radio is kind of wild once you get it configured right.

the emcomm angle is real but its also kind of slow going in terms of adoption. our local ARES group has been talking about it for two years and we did one net with it that went okay but nothing systematic. the store-and-forward relay stuff is theoretically great for passing traffic through intermediary stations but you need enough nodes for it to work well and thats the chicken-and-egg problem. i think it has a real future but its not there yet for anything mission critical in my area anyway.

your 7300 and SignaLink setup is perfectly fine for it, same config as FT8 basically. just watch your audio levels, JS8Call seems a little more sensitive to overdrive than WSJT-X in my experience, or maybe i just noticed it more because i was paying closer attention.

the slot machine thing is exactly how i describe FT8 to people lol. i still run it because dx is dx but i went back to PSK31 for a while just to remember what it felt like to actually talk to someone. js8call is on my list to try properly, just havent sat down with it yet. 40m in the evenings you say — ill have to tune around and see whats happening on 14.078 or wherever they hang out these days.