so ive been running FT8 pretty heavily for the past year or so, got a decent log built up, all that. but honestly it's starting to feel like a fancy contact-counting machine more than actual operating. you send your grid, they send theirs, 73, done. i get why people like it, the weak signal performance is genuinely impressive and i've worked some crazy DX with like 5 watts that i never would have on SSB.

anyway a buddy of mine keeps telling me to try JS8Call and i finally installed it last weekend. got it configured with my IC-7300 and WSJT-X was already set up so the audio routing wasn't too painful. the mode is... interesting. it's clearly built on the same underlying tech as FT8, same kind of waterfall display, but the whole structure is different because you're actually typing messages back and forth instead of just exchanging macros.

the thing is the throughput is painfully slow. like you type a sentence and then you wait. and wait. and then maybe the other station gets it and types back and you wait some more. i was chatting with a guy in Finland for about 45 minutes and we exchanged maybe 6 or 7 messages total. on PSK31 we probably could've had a whole conversation in that time, even at 100 baud or whatever PSK63 does.

but the propagation thing is real. the contact with Finland was happening on 40m during a pretty marginal opening, signal was buried in the noise on the waterfall, i never would have even tried PSK31 at those signal levels. so i get the appeal. just wondering if anyone else has landed on a workflow where they use different modes for different situations rather than just defaulting to FT8 for everything. and is RTTY basically dead at this point outside of contests?

RTTY is absolutely not dead, at least not in contests. the RTTY contests are still pretty active and there's something genuinely fun about running a pile on RTTY that you just dont get with FT8. that said outside of contest weekends yeah it's pretty quiet on the RTTY frequencies most of the time, i'll call CQ for 20 minutes and get nothing on a random Tuesday.

on the JS8Call thing, i kind of agree with your assesment but i think you have to go in with different expectations. im not using it to have a real time conversation, i use it more like... async messaging almost? like i'll leave the software running, go do stuff around the shack, and check back. the heartbeat function where stations can beacon automatically is useful for that. had a guy message me from Manitoba while i was eating dinner, i replied when i got back, he was still there. felt weirdly normal actually.

if you want actual conversation speed and still want some weak signal capability, PSK31 at a decent SNR is still really satisfying. there's still a small community on 20m around 14.070 if you know where to look. not the crowds it used to be but not dead either.

yeah the FT8 contact-counting machine thing is real, i feel that. i still use it but mostly for chasing new ones or new band slots, not just to rack up QSOs for the sake of it. the mode does what it does extremely well and complaining about it is kind of like complaining that a calculator is boring, it's a tool.

JS8Call clicked for me once i stopped thinking of it as chat software and more like a resilient low-bandwidth messaging layer. i've used it a few times for emcomm type exercises where the point was passing actual information through marginal conditions and it worked really well for that. not the same use case as rag chewing but genuinely useful. the store-and-forward stuff is interesting if you dig into it, the network relay concept is cool even if the actual deployed network is pretty sparse depending on where you are.

FT4 is kind of underrated btw if you haven't messed with it much. faster than FT8, better than CW speeds for exchanges, and the sensitivity is still way better than SSB. i use it in contests sometimes when the FT8 sub-band is a zoo.