so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for the signal reports and the grid squares and whatever but honestly it feels a little... hollow? like you make the contact and thats it, 73 and done. someone at the club mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend and had an actual conversation with a guy in Finland which was wild because conditions were garbage, like -18 dB SNR at some points and we were still passing text back and forth.

i guess my question is why doesnt everyone just use JS8Call if you can actually talk with it at those signal levels? is there a coverage thing, like not enough people running it? im on 40m mostly but i also saw there were different speed modes in JS8Call, the Turbo and Normal and Slow ones. been running Normal but not sure if i should switch depending on conditions. also does anyone still bother with PSK31 anymore or is that basically dead at this point

the JS8Call adoption problem is real, its a chicken and egg thing. FT8 has the critical mass so thats where everyone parks. i still fire up JS8Call occasionally and you can usually find someone on 40 or 20 during evenings but its nothing like the FT8 pileups. the HF Winlink crowd overlaps a bit too which helps.

on the speed modes - yeah use Slow when youre really down in the noise, it narrows the bandwidth even further and youll pull out more. Normal is fine for general use. Turbo is basically for when conditions are actually decent and you just want faster throughput, which kind of defeats the whole weak signal point honestly.

PSK31 isnt dead but its close. i worked a guy on 20m PSK31 last month and he seemed genuinely surprised anyone answered. RTTY still has some contest activity which keeps it alive more than anything else at this point.

yeah the hollow feeling with FT8 is exactly why i never got that into it. worked a bunch of entities sure but after a while youre just watching WSJT-X click through contacts automatically and you start to wonder why youre even in the room lol. JS8Call at least feels like radio. had a ragchew with someone running 5 watts from a trail kit in Colorado last fall and that was more fun than any of my FT8 sessions put together