so ive been running FT8 pretty heavily for the last year or so, got my DXCC up to like 180 something and its great for that but honestly sometimes i just want to actually talk to somebody and FT8 is obviously not that. a buddy of mine kept bugging me to try JS8Call and i finally set it up last weekend and im kind of on the fence about it.

the weak signal performance is obviously still there since its built on the same WSJT-X engine basically, and ive had some decent QSOs where we actually exchanged more than a signal report and grid square, which was refreshing. but the activity level compared to FT8 is just... not even close. i was calling CQ on 40m JS8Call for like 45 minutes Sunday afternoon and got two responses, and one of those was just a relay from somebody i wasnt even trying to contact.

im wondering if anybody here has found good times or bands where JS8Call is actually busy enough to be worth monitoring. or is it just kind of a niche thing that never quite took off. i keep PSK31 on 20m sometimes too and honestly sometimes that feels more active than JS8Call. also considered going back to RTTY contesting more seriously since at least during a contest theres actually people to work.

not trying to be negative about it, genuinely curious if im missing something about how people use it

JS8Call has kind of a weird ecosystem honestly. the people who use it tend to be very into the mesh networking side of it, like relaying messages and the store-and-forward stuff, less so just ragchewing. if you go in expecting it to feel like a sideband QSO youre gonna be disappointed most of the time. that said 40m around 7.078 on weekend evenings has been decent for me, probably got 4-5 actual back and forth conversations last month. the activity really picked up slightly during the last big solar event when people were using it for EMCOMM-adjacent stuff.

PSK31 i still have a soft spot for. yeah its not weak signal magic like FT8 but there is something satisfying about a good PSK31 QSO with a decent waterfall full of signals on 14.070. reminds me of the early 2000s when that felt like the future of ham radio digital modes. RTTY contesting is absolutely your answer if you want activity though, CQWW RTTY alone is worth setting up a proper RTTY station for.

yeah JS8Call never really got the critical mass it needed imo. i check in on it occasionally but half the time its tumbleweeds. the concept is cool especially the relay/mesh thing but you need bodies on the air for any of that to matter. FT8 won because it was dead simple to get a contact and people like easy wins i guess.

have you tried FT4 at all during contests? its way faster than FT8 and during something like the FT8 roundup or whatever its actually pretty fun, closer to real contesting pace. not a replacement for conversation obviously but scratches a different itch than regular FT8 grinding does