so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working dx i never thought id work on 100w and a dipole, but honestly after a while it starts feeling like im just exchanging signal reports with robots. like there's no actual conversation happening, just grid squares and signal reports flying around.

somebody in my local club mentioned JS8Call and how its basically built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth. ive been reading about it but im not totally clear on whether its worth learning a whole new piece of software or if the activity level is high enough that id actually find people to talk to. anybody running it regularly? is it mostly dead or is there decent activity on 40 and 20?

also curious how the decode sensitivity compares to ft8 since im running a pretty modest station and that matters a lot to me

JS8Call is great in theory and i do have it installed but honestly the activity is pretty thin compared to FT8, at least in my experience. you can sit on the calling frequencies for a while and not hear much. that said when you do make contact its way more satisfying, you can actually have a real qso, pass traffic, even do some store and forward relay stuff which is genuinely cool for emcomm types.

decode sensitivity is a bit worse than FT8 since the message structure is more flexible and that costs you some margin. not dramatically worse but you will notice it on the weak ones. if weak signal performance is your main thing FT8 still wins, but if you want actual human interaction JS8Call scratches that itch. i usually leave it running in the background on 40m while im doing other stuff and check in when i see a decode pop up.

have you looked at PSK31 at all? i know it feels kind of old school now but theres still activity and you can actually have a ragchew. waterfall full of signals on 20m during decent conditions. ft8 sort of ate its lunch but its not totally dead. just a thought if the conversational thing is what youre after and you dont want to mess around with js8call