So ive been on FT8 for a while now and yeah its great for working new entities and whatever but honestly it feels like a slot machine after a while. click click click, 73, done. no actual conversation happened. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call as a way to actually talk to people using weak signal stuff and im curious if anyone here actually uses it regularly or if its kind of a ghost town on the bands.

my setup is pretty basic, IC-7300 into a end-fed halfwave up about 25 feet, running WSJT-X for the FT8 stuff. i know JS8Call is a separate program, looks like it runs on similar principles to FT8 but slower and you can actually type messages back and forth. tried tuning around 14.078 a couple times in the evenings and heard some activity but wasnt sure if i was decoding it right since the software looked different than what im used to.

also curious how it compares to just using PSK31 for ragchewing, i know PSK31 has been around forever and theres still some activity on 14.070 area. seems like the older guys at the club swear by it but i dont know if the weak signal performance is anywhere close to what JS8Call can do. maybe im overthinking this and should just try both for a few weeks.

JS8Call is not a ghost town but its definitely not FT8 busy either, you kind of have to know when people hang out there. 14.078 is the right spot for 20m, and there's usually some activity in the evenings US time. the thing people dont realize is JS8Call has these store-and-forward message features where you can leave a message for someone and another station relays it, its actually pretty clever for a weak signal mode.

the sensitivity is somewhere between FT8 and a normal SSB conversation, like you can work through some pretty rough propagation but youre not going to pull signals out of the noise the way FT8 does. its more like -10dB or so threshold vs FT8 hitting -24dB. but you get actual words back so theres that.

PSK31 comparison is a fair question. PSK31 needs a much better signal to work, its not even close on sensitivity. but the typing feels more natural because theres no wait cycle, you just type and the other person sees it coming in real time character by character. nostalgic almost. i still fire it up sometimes but yeah for actual weak signal work JS8Call wins pretty easily. your 7300 and that EFHW should do fine, just make sure your audio levels are sane going into the soundcard.

been using JS8Call on and off for maybe two years now, its honestly my favorite mode when im not chasing DX. the HF APRS-like stuff where you can query nearby stations for heard list and all that is genuinely useful during nets or when propagation is sketchy. theres a small but pretty active community especially on 40m at night.

one thing tho — make sure you grab the latest build from the JS8Call website not whatever might be in your distro packages if youre on linux, the older versions had some weird UI bugs. and set your bandwidth to normal mode first before messing with the turbo or slow settings.