so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and i get it, its great for weak signal stuff and yeah ive worked a lot of DX i wouldnt have touched on SSB with my setup (100w and a wire in the attic). but lately it feels kind of... hollow? like youre not really talking to anyone, youre just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and calling it a QSO.

started messing with JS8Call last month and its a completely different feel. its based on the same WSJT engine basically but youre actually typing messages back and forth, can do relay stuff, heartbeat beacons, the whole thing runs slower and needs a bit more signal but its still way more capable than you'd think. worked a guy in finland from western PA last week with solid copy both ways and we actually had a short conversation about his antenna setup which was cool.

anyway my question is whether anyone else uses JS8Call regularly and if there are enough people on to make it worth monitoring. i check 14.078 USB and sometimes its pretty quiet. also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 because i feel like that mode kind of died and JS8Call is what PSK31 was supposed to grow into if that makes sense.

yeah PSK31 is pretty much a ghost town these days, maybe some activity on 20m during good conditions but nothing like it was in like 2010-2012 when you could pull up the waterfall and it was wall to wall signals. FT8 basically ate everything. RTTY still has contest activity which keeps it alive but for casual digital ragchewing its slim pickings outside of JS8Call honestly.

i run JS8Call a few times a week and youre right that 14.078 can be quiet but ive had better luck checking in the evenings around 0100-0200z, there seems to be a small but dedicated group that gets on then. also theres a few JS8Call nets that operate on a schedule if you dig around the groups.io list for it. the relay feature is genuinely cool if you can get a few stations involved, ive seen messages get passed across the country through like 3 or 4 hops which is wild when you think about it. its a much better mode for actual communication vs just logging squares.

FT8 hollow is exactly the right word for it lol. i run it for dxpeditions and new entities because thats what everyones using and you kind of have to, but i dont count it as a real QSO mentally even though logically it meets the definition. JS8Call i havent tried yet but you've made me want to. does it need a pretty clean audio path or is it forgiving like FT8 with the timing stuff