so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working dx and filling out the log but honestly it feels like sending postcards to strangers. you get the signal report, the grid, the 73 and thats it. heard about JS8Call from a guy at the club last month and been messing with it this week and i think i finally get what people mean when they say digital modes can actually be... social?

like the whole thing is built on the same weak signal tech as FT8 but the timing isnt rigid, you can type actual sentences, there's store-and-forward stuff baked in. worked a guy in Colorado from my qth in Ohio last night on 40m with me running maybe 25 watts into a dipole and the band was not in great shape. we had like a 20 minute back and forth about his antenna setup. that genuinely felt like a radio contact in a way that FT8 log-and-move-on stuff doesnt always.

anyway my question is more about the weak signal side of things - does JS8Call actually decode as deep as FT8 or is there a real tradeoff there? i know FT8 gets down to like -24dB or whatever under the noise floor, is JS8Call significantly worse at that or is it close enough that it doesnt really matter for normal operations? trying to figure out if theres a reason to keep both running or just park on JS8Call when im not specifically chasing dx.

Yeah theres definitely a sensitivity tradeoff. JS8Call is running a wider bandwidth than FT8 basically so the noise floor hits it harder. From what ive seen in practice FT8 can pull out signals that JS8Call just wont decode, probably somewhere in the range of 5-7dB difference depending on conditions and how its configured. For casual ragchewing on a decent band it doesnt matter, 40m at night with even modest power youre going to be fine. But if youre trying to work across the Pacific on 10 watts during a mediocre opening FT8 is going to do things JS8Call cant.

I keep both going honestly. FT8 on one slice of the waterfall doing its thing, JS8Call on another frequency when im actually sitting at the radio and want to talk to someone. They serve different purposes and running them simultaneously on the same radio isnt hard if youre using something like WSJT-X and the JS8Call client with a virtual audio cable setup. Bit of a pain to configure the first time but its been running stable for me for months.

this is kind of the eternal debate in the digital world right now. FT8 is basically optimized to the point where its almost too efficient - you make the contact but you didnt really... do anything. i went through the same thing. logged like 200 countries in two years on FT8 and felt weirdly empty about it compared to the handful of real PSK31 ragchews i had back in the day where you'd spend an hour talking to some retired engineer in Portugal about his homebrew equipment.

JS8Call scratches that itch but yeah you give up some of the extreme weak signal capability. for emcomm guys its actually really interesting because of the relay and store-forward features, theres groups using it for off-grid messaging. different use case entirely from dx chasing. if your goal is just to have real conversations over marginal paths id say the sensitivity difference is not going to ruin your day on 40 or 80m.