so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for chasing DX and filling the log but it kind of feels hollow after a while you know? like youre just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and thats it. read about JS8Call a while back and finally installed it last week and i gotta say its a different experience entirely — you can actually type sentences to people which sounds obvious but its a big deal after FT8 where the protocol basically wont let you say anything meaningful.

the tradeoff is real though. JS8Call is way slower and the SNR requirements arent quite as brutal as FT8 but its not like you can work -24 dB stations either. i was running it on 40m last night around 0200z and there were maybe a dozen guys active in my region, compared to the wall of signals on 7.074. so its a quieter experience in both senses of the word.

curious if anyone here runs both regularly and how you split your time between them. also wondering if PSK31 is even worth going back to at this point or if its basically dead on most bands. i fired it up on 20m last weekend and found maybe 3-4 signals the whole session which was kind of depressing compared to what it used to be.

yeah PSK31 is pretty much a ghost town these days, at least on HF. you'll occasionally find some activity on 20m around 14.070 on weekends but its nothing like it was in like 2010-2015 when that mode was everywhere. kind of sad honestly because PSK31 actually rewarded good antenna work and low power in a way that felt more tangible than FT8 — if you could decode someone it meant the path was actually usable for a QSO not just a marginal signal report exchange.

i run JS8Call pretty regularly on 40 and 80m, mostly late evenings. the HF Messenger network integration is handy if you care about store-and-forward messaging but honestly i mostly just use it to ragchew with a few regulars. the heartbeat beacon feature is nice too if you want to monitor propagation passively. its never going to have the user base of FT8 but i think thats kind of the point — the people who are on it actually want to communicate not just log contacts.

for weak signal stuff though nothing really touches FT8 and FT4 for throughput vs SNR. if youre trying to work a rare one through a pile at -20 dB js8call isnt going to cut it. different tools for different jobs i guess.

RTTY is still worth keeping in your toolkit imo especially if you do any contesting — RTTY contests still get decent participation and its a mode that actually requires a little bit of skill to set up properly which filters out some of the appliance operator crowd lol. i run MMTTY through N1MM and it works fine, not as exotic as some of the newer stuff but it gets the job done.

the JS8Call thing is interesting i might have to try it again. i installed it a while ago but couldnt find anyone to talk to and kind of gave up. maybe i was on the wrong band or wrong time. what freqs do you usually find activity on 40m?