so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and watching the waterfall light up but honestly after a while it feels like youre just logging callsigns, theres no real... interaction happening you know? somebody told me to try JS8Call because it lets you have actual back and forth messages and i installed it last week and have been poking around but im not totally sure im using it right or if the band conditions just havent been cooperating

my setup is a ft-991a into a trapped vertical, nothing fancy, and on 40m at night i can see a handful of JS8 signals on the waterfall but when i try to respond to someone it seems like either they dont hear me or they just move on before i can get a reply back. is the timing less rigid than FT8? i keep reading that its more forgiving but i cant quite figure out the flow of a conversation on it the way i can with FT8 where everything is so locked in

also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 with any success. i learned that mode years ago before i got into FT8 and always kind of liked it because you could actually type back and forth in near real time but i never hear anyone talk about it anymore. feels like FT8 ate everything

yeah JS8Call takes some getting used to because the timing is way more relaxed compared to FT8. theres no strict 15 second windows so people can be mid-transmission when you try to jump in and it gets a little chaotic until you get the feel for it. what helped me was just lurking on a busy JS8 frequency for a while and watching how conversations actually flow before trying to participate. 40m in the evening is usually decent, try around 7.078 and just watch for a bit

the other thing is JS8Call has this concept of groups and heartbeats and relays that FT8 just doesnt have at all, its almost a different philosophy of operating. FT8 is basically a contact machine, JS8 is more like a slow chat room with HF propagation doing weird things to the delivery. once it clicks it's pretty satisfying especially for emcomm type scenarios where you want to pass actual information

as for PSK31, yeah its pretty quiet these days honestly. i'll occasionally spin up fldigi and park on 14.070 on a weekend afternoon and hear a few signals but its nothing like it was in like 2005-2008 when that was THE digital mode. hard to compete with FT8's sensitivity advantage

FT8 ate PSK31 basically, at least in terms of activity. which is kind of a shame because PSK31 on a good day with a decent signal was genuinely fun, real QSOs not just a 73 and done. i still think theres a place for RTTY too but try convincing anyone under 60 to fire up a TNC these days lol

your vertical should be fine for JS8, honestly if youre seeing signals youre in the right ballpark. the mode runs at a few different speeds now, JS8 normal is i think around 40wpm equivalent and theres a turbo and a slow mode. make sure youre not trying to decode fast mode signals if your software is set to normal or vice versa, that tripped me up for a while and i kept wondering why decodes looked garbled