so ive been running FT8 for about a year now mostly on 20m and 40m, usually around 10-15 watts from an IC-7300 into a dipole in the attic. works great obviously, FT8 is basically magic at low power. but ive been reading about JS8Call lately and i guess its built on the same FT8 encoding engine but designed more for actual conversations and mesh networking stuff? i tried it a couple weekends ago and honestly i wasnt sure what i was doing half the time.

the thing that confuses me is the timing windows are more flexible compared to FT8's rigid 15 second slots, but i kept missing replies because i didnt understand the heartbeat stuff or how the relay messaging works. got a couple contacts into the midwest from here in NC but nothing that really wowed me.

i guess my question is - for weak signal work where im trying to actually communicate rather than just log a grid square, is JS8Call worth putting more time into learning? or am i better off just sticking to FT8/FT4 for the casual stuff and maybe exploring PSK31 for more conversational QSOs? i havent touched PSK31 in years honestly, used to run it back in the day with a SignaLink and it was fun but the band conditions have to be a lot better for it to work right.

also does anyone run WSPR alongside any of this for propagation checking or is that overkill

JS8Call is genuinely worth it but yeah the learning curve is real especially if youre coming straight from FT8 where everything is automated. the heartbeat beacons are kind of the key to understanding how the network side works - once you let it run for a few hours and see who's hearing you passively it starts making more sense. the relay stuff is cool in theory, ive had messages forwarded like 3 hops before which is wild at 5 watts.

that said i wouldnt dump PSK31 entirely. on a good evening on 20m PSK is still a solid mode for a real back and forth conversation, JS8Call just gives you that when conditions are marginal. they kind of serve different purposes. FT8 is for when you want contacts, JS8Call is for when you want to actually say something in rough conditions, PSK is for when conditions are decent and you want a proper ragchew without the structured format feeling like a chat bot conversation.

WSPR i run overnight on 80m mostly just to see what's getting out. it doesn't cost you anything to run it passively and the wspr.rocks data is actually useful for knowing if a band is worth getting on.

the timing thing in JS8Call tripped me up too. i think the default is the normal speed mode which is like 15ish seconds per frame but you can also run turbo which is faster but worse sensitivity. i mostly stay on normal. honestly once i stopped expecting it to work like FT8 and just treated it like a slow keyboard chat it clicked for me.

one thing i noticed is the JS8Call community tends to cluster on specific frequencies and they dont always move around much so if youre not near those calling frequencies you might not hear much activity. 14.078 is usually the busiest spot on 20m from what ive seen.