so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its incredible for weak signal work, i regularly work stuff ive got no business working with 10 watts into a compromised antenna. but its not really a conversation is it. you exchange signal reports and grid squares and thats kind of it. felt like i was playing a video game more than operating.

somebody at the club mentioned JS8Call and i installed it last weekend. i like the idea, its basically built on the same WSJT-X engine as FT8 but the sequences are longer and you can actually type messages back and forth. the latency is brutal though, like youre waiting 15 seconds between each exchange and by the time you get a reply the band has shifted and the signal is half gone. maybe thats just the nature of operating that close to the noise floor i dunno.

PSK31 i used to run a lot on 20m and honestly that felt more like a real QSO, you could type in real time basically and the decoding was pretty solid down to maybe -15 or so on a good day. but JS8Call is supposed to go way deeper than that right? like into the -20s?

anyway im not really asking anything specific just curious if other people use JS8Call for actual ragchewing or if its mostly used for messaging relay stuff and store-and-forward. seems like a cool concept that maybe doesnt quite deliver in practice but i could be wrong, havent given it a fair shake yet

Yeah JS8Call is a bit of a different animal. I use it mostly for the relay and inbox stuff honestly — there's a small group of us that leave nodes running 24/7 on 40m and you can send messages that get stored and forwarded when propagation allows. for actual real-time conversation it can be frustrating like you said, you kind of have to be patient and accept that a short back and forth might take 10 minutes. once you accept that its not trying to be PSK31 it makes more sense.

the weak signal performance is real though. ive decoded stations on JS8Call that were completely inaudible, like nothing on the waterfall that i could see, and they were getting through. that part is genuinely impressive. FT4 is worth looking at too if you want something faster than FT8 for contest-style stuff, the timing is tighter and the sequence is shorter, less time per exchange.

PSK31 i have a soft spot for too but honestly 20m is so noisy here that anything without that kind of forward error correction just falls apart when conditions dip. RTTY still has a place in contests but for general weak signal work the WSJT modes just eat its lunch at this point

js8call has a mode called turbo or something that speeds up the exchange if both stations support it, might help with the latency issue youre describing. i only tried it once and couldnt get it working right so i cant really say how well it works in practice but its there