so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, managed to work into japan last week running maybe 10 watts into a compromised attic dipole which i never would have pulled off on SSB. but honestly it feels like logging software at this point, you click, it exchanges signal reports, you log it, next QSO. theres no actual conversation happening.

started poking around JS8Call because at least in theory you can type actual sentences back and forth and it still has that weak signal capability inherited from FT8's underpinnings. set it up last night and the band was pretty quiet but i did see a few stations calling CQ. my question is whether anyone actually uses this regularly or is it mostly empty. like is there a time of day or a specific frequency where people congregate because i was watching 14.078 for a while and it felt like a ghost town compared to the FT8 watering holes.

also curious if the timing sync is as strict as FT8 or if its a bit more forgiving, my laptop clock drifts sometimes and i have to keep resyncing with that internet time thing

JS8Call is worth it if you find the right times honestly. there's a decent crowd that shows up on 40m in the evenings, at least in north america. 7.078 tends to be more active than 20m in my experience, probably because the skip on 20 just works against you for regional ragchewing. the whole point of JS8 to me is it fills the gap between FT8 (pure exchange, zero personality) and like, actually sitting down for a PSK31 QSO. you can dash off a short message and walk away and they'll reply when they reply, its almost async which i kind of like.

timing is way more forgiving than FT8. FT8 will fall apart if youre off by more than like a second or so, JS8Call has a longer transmission window and seems to handle some drift. i run meinberg NTP on the shack PC and basically never think about it anymore, might be worth setting up if youre having issues.

yeah FT8 kind of killed my interest in operating for a while because it felt like i was just running a bot. i switched back to PSK31 for a bit which sounds crazy but at least people type sentences at you. JS8Call is somewhere in the middle but i'll be honest the UI took me a while to wrap my head around, lots going on. stick with it though, once you figure out the relay/store and forward stuff it gets interesting especially for portable/emergency type scenarios where you're not always both online at the same time