so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and all that but honestly after a while it feels like youre just exchanging signal reports with robots. i started poking around JS8Call last month and its a completely different animal. like you can actually type to someone and have a conversation, the latency is a bit rough but for weak signal stuff it really shines.

my question is whether anyone here regularly uses JS8Call for nets or rag chewing because i cant seem to find a lot of activity on the frequencies i've been checking. tried 14.078 a few times and heard a handful of stations but nothing like the wall of signals you get on the FT8 portion. wondering if im just on at the wrong times or if the mode never really took off the way some people hoped it would.

also for context im running an IC-7300 into a trapped vertical, pretty modest setup but FT8 works fine so the rx should be decent enough. just trying to figure out if JS8Call is worth investing more time into or if i should just accept that FT8 is what it is and move on

JS8Call never really hit critical mass the way FT8 did and i think thats just the reality of it. KN4CRD designed it for a specific niche — emergency comms, store and forward messaging, that kind of thing — and it does that really well but casual rag chewing crowd mostly stayed on SSB or went to FT8 for the DX hunting. you'll find more activity during regional JS8 nets, there are a few that run on 40m in the evenings depending on your location. the HF conditions also matter a lot more with JS8 since your decoding window is wider than FT8's 15 seconds.

honestly your 7300 is more than capable. might just be a timing and band thing. i'd check the JS8Call groups.io reflector, they post net schedules there occasionally and its more active than you'd think for a niche mode.

yeah same boat here, i got into JS8 thinking id find all these people to chat with and it was pretty quiet at first. found a small group that does a sunday morning net on 40m and that kind of kickstarted it for me. once you have like 3 or 4 regulars it gets fun pretty quick. the heartbeat feature is kinda cool too where it just periodically announces your presence and you can see whos around without actively calling anyone. feels more like a real band than FT8 which is just... i dunno, a contact assembly line lol

PSK31 is still my go-to for actual keyboard to keyboard chatting though, theres still decent activity on 14.070 most days and the waterfall is satisfying in a way that newer modes arent