so ive been running ft8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and all that but honestly it feels kind of hollow after a while, like youre not really talking to anyone, just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and thats it. someone at my club mentioned js8call as kind of a middle ground where you can actually have a conversation but still get the weak signal benefits and i set it up last weekend and im still not entirely sure i understand what im doing

the waterfall looks familiar enough coming from wsjtx but the timing is different and i keep missing messages or they come in fragmented and i cant tell if thats just the nature of the mode or if my timing is off or what. running an ic-7300 into a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. is js8call even still actively being used or did people kind of drift away from it? i see some traffic on 7.078 but its not exactly busy

also curious if anyone has opinions on psk31 still being worth running in, i know its old but ive heard some guys swear by it for ragchewing when conditions are decent

js8call is definitely still alive, just not ft8 busy if that makes sense. 40m is probably your best bet especially in evenings, also see decent activity on 20m during the day. the fragmented messages thing is normal to an extent - the mode has different speed settings (turbo, fast, normal, slow) and if someone is running slow mode youll get chunks that trickle in over a longer window. took me a bit to get used to that mentally vs ft8 where everything is this tight 15 second cycle

the thing i actually like about it for emcomm practice is you can relay messages through other stations automatically which is kind of cool. its not a ragchew replacement exactly but its more than ft8 ever was. psk31 i still fire up occasionally when im bored, you can definitely still find people on 14.070 and nearby, and there is something satisfying about actually typing back and forth in real time even if the mode is showing its age

honestly ft8 hollow feeling is a real thing and im glad someone said it. i did like 4000 qsos in my first year and then just kinda stopped and went back to ssb. tried js8call a few times but my schedule never lined up with when people were actually on so it felt like shouting into the void

one thing worth mentioning if you havent already - make sure your system clock is synced properly, like within a second, because js8call is not quite as forgiving as ft8 on timing drift and that can cause exactly the kind of fragmented decode issues youre describing. i use dimension 4 on windows to keep mine tight. also your audio levels matter more than people think, i was running too hot into the radio for a while and getting weird decode failures that turned out to be just compression artifacts from the radio's ALC hammering the signal