so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly it works great for what it is but ive been feeling like its basically just a fancy beacon exchange at this point. you get a signal report, you confirm the qso, done. there's no actual communication happening and that started to bother me after a while.

started reading about JS8Call and it sounds like what i actually want — weak signal capability but you can type actual sentences back and forth. my question is whether the weak signal performance is anywhere close to FT8 or if youre giving up a lot to get that conversational capability. i know JS8Call has different speed modes, turbo normal slow etc, and i assume the slower ones dig deeper into the noise but i havent seen a good side by side comparison anywhere.

also wondering if theres even enough activity to bother. i pulled up the JS8Call activity on pskreporter and it looked pretty sparse compared to FT8 which is absolutely packed. running a G5RV at about 35 feet and an IC-7300 so the station isnt the issue, more just trying to figure out if its worth spinning up another software instance and hunting for activity that might not be there.

still mess around with PSK31 occasionally when i want to actually type words to someone, old habits i guess, but even that feels like it takes a lot more effort to find a qso these days than it used to.

JS8Call is genuinely good but yeah the activity thing is real. 40m and 20m during the day are your best bet, i find more people on 40 in the evenings especially. the SNR performance isnt quite FT8 level — FT8 can decode down to like -24dB or so and JS8Call in slow mode gets you maybe -18 to -20ish depending on conditions and how clean your audio chain is. so youre giving something up but its not a huge cliff either, most of the time if you can hear anything at all you can make a contact.

the thing that hooked me was the store and forward messaging and the ability to query heartbeat stations. theres a small but pretty dedicated group of guys who leave JS8Call running and you can leave messages for people even if theyre not at the keyboard. its a different vibe than FT8 for sure. worth running both honestly, they dont really conflict if you just split the screen and keep them on different parts of the band.

psk31 nostalgia is real lol. i miss when 14.070 was just wall to wall psk signals on a weekend afternoon. that was actual ragchewing over digital, people would go back and forth for 20 minutes. now its a ghost town most of the time which is kinda sad.

i tried JS8Call last winter and made a handful of contacts but it did feel like work to find someone. FT4 is somewhere in the middle i guess if you want slightly more throughput than FT8 but same basic format. doesnt really solve your problem of wanting a real exchange though. RTTY contesting is still pretty alive if you havent tried that, thats at least got some chaos and energy to it even if its not a conversation either.