so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for getting contacts logged but it always felt kind of hollow to me, like youre not really talking to anyone just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and then its over. heard about JS8Call from a guy at my club who said it was basically FT8 but you could actually have a conversation and i set it up last weekend and honestly im not sure im using it right

the waterfall looks similar to WSJT-X and i get that the protocol is derived from FT8 but the timing seems way more flexible which is confusing me after being so used to the rigid 15 second windows. also the SNR seems to vary a lot more than im used to and im not sure if thats just because more people are on FT8 or if im doing something wrong on the JS8Call side. running an IC-7300 into a dipole up about 35 feet, nothing fancy

also genuinely curious if anyone still does PSK31 because from what i can tell the weak signal performance isnt anywhere near FT8 or JS8 but i kind of like the idea of actually typing back and forth in something close to real time. is RTTY just completely dead at this point or does it still show up in contests mostly

JS8Call is definitely a different mindset than FT8. the flexible timing threw me off too at first because youre so trained to watch the clock with WSJT-X. what helped me was just thinking of it more like a slow chat room than a contact exchange. you can actually leave a message for someone and they pick it up when they tune in, theres a store-and-forward thing going on in some nets that i thought was pretty cool for emergency comm type scenarios

as for PSK31, its not dead but its definitely a lot quieter than it was maybe 10-15 years ago. i still fire up fldigi occasionally and you can find activity on 14.070 area if the band is decent. the thing people forget is PSK31 at good SNR is actually really pleasant to use, typing feels natural and decodes are solid. its just that when conditions get rough FT8 will walk all over it which is why everyone migrated. RTTY yeah mostly contests now, RTTY roundup type events still get decent turnout

rtty is absolutely not dead during contests, cqww rtty is a huge event and the bands get pretty packed. outside of contests though yeah its sparse. i have a soft spot for it because theres something satisfying about the old mechanical feel of it even running it through software

one thing with js8call - make sure youre not just sitting on the default heartbeat mode and actually initiating contacts, i made that mistake for the first two weeks i ran it and just wondered why nobody was responding to me lol. also the snr numbers arent directly comparable to wsjt-x so dont stress that too much