so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for working DX and filling the logbook but it always felt kind of hollow to me. like you exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats it, no actual contact really. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and i finally installed it last weekend and messed around on 40m for a few hours.

the concept makes sense to me — its basically FT8 under the hood but stretched out so you can send actual text messages back and forth, still works at really low signal levels. i was actually able to hold a back and forth with a guy in tennessee while my signal was pretty rough, maybe -18 or so on his end. that wouldnt have worked on SSB obviously.

my question is whether people actually use it regularly or if its one of those modes thats always kind of empty. every time i tuned around i saw maybe 4 or 5 stations but nobody was really ragchewing, mostly just beacons and heartbeat messages. is there a specific time or freq where people gather or is the activity just low in general. also curious if anyone has compared it to PSK31 for rag chewing purposes because i ran PSK31 back in the day and loved it but propagation has to cooperate way more for that to work.

JS8Call activity is real but you gotta know where to look. 40m around 7.078 seems to be the most consistent spot at least in north america, and evenings local time tend to have more people actually chatting vs just the automated heartbeat stuff. the heartbeat and aprs-relay type functions make it look busier than it is in terms of real operators sitting at the keyboard.

your comparison to PSK31 is fair. PSK31 is honestly still my favorite for a proper keyboard-to-keyboard qso when the band cooperates, theres something about the waterfall and seeing that little BPSK trace that just feels right. but JS8Call has saved me on marginal evenings where 20m was too long and 40m was getting noisy — that extra few dB of weak signal performance actually matters. i think of them as different tools. PSK31 when the band is decent, JS8Call when its sketchy or i want the store-and-forward stuff to work.

yeah the activity thing is the frustrating part honestly. i check in on JS8Call maybe once a week and sometimes its hopping and sometimes its dead. theres a net on HF that uses it, i forget which one, but that might be worth looking up if you want guaranteed activity at a specific time rather than just hoping someone is around.

FT8 kind of ate everything else for casual weak-signal stuff which is a shame. WSPR at least has a clear purpose and people run it all the time but the middle ground modes like JS8 and Olivia just sort of struggle for users. not saying give up on it, just that expectations matter.