so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new countries and all that but it kind of feels like logging entries rather than actually talking to anyone. saw some posts about JS8Call and downloaded it last week and honestly its kind of blowing my mind that i didnt find this earlier

the thing is though im having trouble wrapping my head around when to use what. like for pure DX chasing and contesting FT8 and FT4 make total sense to me now, 15 second sequences, boom done. but JS8Call feels like it wants to be something in between CW ragchewing and digital efficiency and i cant quite figure out where it fits into my operating habits

also been messing with PSK31 on 20m late nights and theres still people on there which surprised me. thought it was basically dead. RTTY i havent touched yet but i keep seeing it come up for contesting specifically

anyone run all of these regularly? how do you decide which one to fire up depending on conditions or what youre trying to do. im on a G90 with a random wire up about 35 feet if that matters, pretty typical noise floor here in a suburban area

JS8Call really does scratch a different itch than FT8. the way i think about it — FT8 is for when you want to work someone, JS8Call is for when you want to talk to someone. sounds obvious but it took me a while to actually feel that difference operationally

i use JS8Call mostly on 40m in the evenings for a loose group of guys we have, kind of a rolling informal net. the store-and-forward relay stuff is genuinely clever if you have nodes set up. weak signal performance is still really good, maybe not quite FT8 level but close enough that it doesnt matter most of the time

PSK31 is not dead but its definitely slower pace than it used to be. i still pull it up maybe once a week and can usually find someone on 14.070 or close. theres something satisfying about watching the waterfall and seeing those little carrier lines

RTTY for contesting is its own thing entirely, the speeds involved and the whole feel of it is just different. CQWW RTTY is worth getting on for just to experience it once honestly. your G90 will handle all of this fine, the mode really doesnt care about the radio much as long as youre getting audio in and out cleanly

yeah the PSK31 thing caught me off guard too when i first got back into the hobby a couple years ago. figured everything had moved to FT8 but theres a whole crowd that never left the older modes and honestly i respect it

one thing worth mentioning if you havent done it yet — make sure your audio levels going into WSJT-X or JS8Call are set right. i spent like two weeks wondering why my FT8 decodes were garbage compared to what other people were reporting and it turned out my mic gain was way too hot and i was clipping the ADC on the interface. dropped it way down and suddenly i was decoding twice as many signals. seems obvious in hindsight but nobody told me when i started