so me and a friend of mine both got our general tickets around the same time and we've been trying to stay in touch on HF, mostly just to say hey and compare notes on whatever we've been messing with. we tried FT8 for a while and yeah it works great, like stupid reliable even when the band sounds completely dead, but the problem is you cant really have a conversation on it. you get the grid square and signal report and thats pretty much it unless you use the free text which is so limited its basically useless for anything real.

someone on another forum mentioned JS8Call and i looked into it a bit, seems like it was built exactly for this kind of thing? like actual keyboard to keyboard chat but still using a weak signal mode so it works even when conditions are garbage. has anyone used it regularly for something like this? im wondering how much worse the signal performance is compared to FT8, like are we gonna suddenly not be able to hit each other when we could before. we're both running modest setups, i've got a 100w rig into a dipole probably 30ft up and he's on a vertical with some radials, so nothing fancy.

also does it use the same 40m/20m frequencies as FT8 or is there a different spot to dial in

JS8Call is definitely the right tool for what you're describing. I've been using it off and on for about two years now and the keyboard chat thing works really well once you get used to the flow of it, its not instant like texting obviously but you can have an actual back and forth. the sensitivity is a bit less than FT8, maybe 5 or 6 dB if i had to guess, but honestly in practice on 20m or 40m when conditions are halfway decent you probably wont notice a huge difference for a path thats already working on FT8.

the frequencies are different yeah, for 20m js8call hangs around 14.078 MHz and 40m is around 7.078, give or take depending on what activity looks like. there's also a normal mode and a slow mode and a fast mode which trade speed for sensitivity, so if conditions go to hell you can drop down to the slow mode and squeeze more out of the link. worth just installing it and poking around, the interface is a little quirky but you get used to it

yeah we use js8call for our local emcomm group for exactly this reason, being able to send actual messages not just signal reports is kind of the whole point. ft8 is great for proving a path exists but thats about it. one thing i'll mention is the heartbeat feature where your station can automatically beacon out every so often, makes it easy to see if your buddy is on without having to coordinate times too tightly. its pretty cool once you get it dialed in