so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get the appeal, weak signal performance is genuinely impressive and ive worked stuff i never could have on SSB with my modest setup (100w and a wire antenna up about 25 feet). but every contact is just a signal report exchange and then 73 and you're done. felt kinda hollow after a while.

someone on another forum mentioned JS8Call as a way to actually have QSOs on weak signal without it being completely automated, so i installed it last week and been poking around. the interface is a bit confusing compared to WSJT-X honestly, and i cant figure out if the activity level near me is just really low or if im doing something wrong with the dial frequency. running it on 40m around 7.078 which i think is right.

also been meaning to try PSK31 again - i used to run it years ago with DigiPan and had some good ragchews. is it still active enough to be worth firing up or did FT8 basically kill it. same question for RTTY i guess, though i know that still has a contest scene so maybe different story there.

JS8Call activity kind of depends on where you are and what time of day. in my experience 40m gets some traffic in the evenings, 20m during the day if propagation is decent. the thing people dont realize is you have to just leave it running and let the heartbeat beacons do their thing - its not like FT8 where you sit there and call CQ every 15 seconds. more like leaving a radio on and occasionally someone responds.

the @ALLCALL and @HB stuff takes some getting used to. i'd recommend joining the JS8Call groups.io list because there are scheduled nets that run on it which is probably your best bet for actually making contact until you get a feel for when the band is populated.

as for PSK31 - yeah its pretty quiet these days. not dead but you might sit on 14.070 for a half hour and only see a handful of signals. still works great when you find someone, its just finding them thats the trick. RTTY definitely has more life left especially around contest weekends, CQWW RTTY is still a big deal.

i had the same feeling about FT8 tbh. great mode technically but after a while youre just clicking a grid square and moving on, doesnt feel like amateur radio in the old sense. switched most of my digital time to RTTY and the occasional PSK31 contact and felt way more satisfying even if the signal reports are worse.

one thing worth mentioning - if weak signal ragchew is the goal, there's also olivia which nobody talks about anymore but its genuinely impressive in poor conditions and you can actually type full sentences. 500hz bandwidth on 14.106 is where ive seen some activity. not a ton but more than i expected.