so ive been on FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and whatever but honestly after a while it starts to feel like youre just collecting grid squares and theres no actual... communication happening? like i know thats kind of the point but still

anyway i stumbled onto JS8Call a few weeks back and the idea of it really appealed to me — same kind of weak signal encoding but you can actually type messages back and forth. set it up on 40m and managed a few QSOs but the band seemed pretty dead compared to what i see on FT8. maybe i was on the wrong frequencies or wrong time of day, i dunno.

curious if anyone here uses it regularly and whether its worth sticking with or if its just kind of a niche thing that never really took off. also wondering how it compares sensitivity-wise to FT8 — i know FT8 is supposedly down around -20 something dB SNR which is pretty insane, does JS8 get anywhere close to that?

for context im running an IC-7300 into a G5RV up about 30 feet, nothing fancy

JS8Call never really hit critical mass the way FT8 did unfortunately. the concept is genuinely cool — jason goode based it on FT8's LDPC coding so the sensitivity is in the same ballpark, maybe a few dB worse depending on speed setting you use. there's a slow mode that gets pretty deep but at that point youre waiting forever for each transmission to finish.

the problem is just activity. FT8 won because everyone piled on at once and now theres always someone to work. JS8 kind of needs a scheduled sked or a net to really be useful. there are a few nets running on 40 and 80m, think the HF winlink crowd overlaps with it sometimes too. worth checking the JS8Call groups.io list for net schedules before you write it off — i had the same experience just randomly tuning around and finding nothing, but once i joined a net it made a lot more sense as a mode.

if you want actual ragchew-style keyboard to keyboard stuff on weak signals PSK31 still has a decent following on 20m around 14.070, and the waterfall is usually pretty active on weekends. not as sensitive as FT8 obviously but you can have a real back and forth without the 15 second timing thing driving you crazy

yeah the activity thing is the killer with JS8. i check in on the watering holes every now and then and sometimes its hopping and sometimes its completely dead. no real pattern i can figure out.

one thing though — your G5RV at 30 feet is probaly fine for 40m but if youre having trouble hearing anyone it might be worth checking your noise floor in WSJT-X or the JS8Call waterfall. the 7300 is a great rig but i found mine was picking up a ton of hash from the shack computer until i sorted out the USB grounding. made like a 10dB difference on the weak signal stuff which is huge when youre trying to decode -18dB signals