so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is honestly kind of insane, worked a ZL from my attic dipole last winter with like 5 watts which blew my mind. but its also kind of... soulless? every qso is the same 4 exchanges and youre done. i started poking around JS8Call because at least in theory you can actually type back and forth like a real conversation, kind of like PSK31 used to be but with the weak signal advantage of FT8s underlying engine.

anyway i set it up last weekend and the waterfall looks busy enough on 40m but i spent like two hours calling CQ and got exactly one reply, and that guy just sent me his grid and disappeared. so my question is, is JS8Call actually active enough to be worth running, or is it kind of a ghost town? also does anyone run it on 20m or 10m when that band is open, wondering if thats better than 40 for finding people who actually want to chat. im running an IC-7300 into a G5RV if that matters.

also unrelated but does anyone still do PSK31 at all? i feel like that mode just vanished overnight a few years back and i miss it honestly

JS8Call is definitely not as busy as FT8 but its not dead either, you just have to know where to look. 40m around 7.078 is where most of the activity is, at least in my experience, and the best times are usually evenings and weekends. i do get actual multi-exchange conversations on there maybe once or twice a week, which compared to FT8 feels like a lot honestly. the heartbeat beacons are kind of useful too once you get a feel for how the network side of things works.

as for PSK31, yeah its basically gone. i still see the occasional signal on 14.070 but its mostly old timers ragchewing and even thats gotten sparse. RTTY is actually hanging on better than PSK31 which i would not have predicted five years ago, mostly because of contest activity keeping it alive. the digital landscape just moves fast i guess, everyone piled onto FT8 and the other modes kind of starved out.

the soulless thing is real and i think about it more than i should lol. FT8 is basically a spotting network that also counts as a contact, i dont know what else to call it. i use it when the bands are rough and i need to confirm propagation somewhere but it doesnt feel like operating to me.

tried JS8Call a few times and had the same experience as you, lots of waiting. but i did have one solid 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Slovenia on 20m last spring so the capability is there. i think the problem is critical mass, everyone who would want to do slow conversational digital just isnt in the same place at the same time. its like trying to have a conversation at a party where everyone keeps leaving the room every 15 seconds