so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah it works great for getting contacts logged and working DX i wouldnt normally hear on SSB but honestly after a while it feels kind of hollow, like youre just exchanging signal reports with a robot and calling it a QSO

somebody on my local club net mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend and its a completely different vibe, you can actually have a conversation which is wild considering the signal levels it works at. worked a guy in scotland from ohio running maybe 20 watts into a dipole and we actually chatted for like 20 minutes about his antenna setup

my question is whether theres a whole community still active on JS8Call or if its kind of a ghost town most of the time. i check 14.078 and sometimes i see activity but other times its just dead. also wondering if the HB9 heartbeat thing is worth enabling or if it just clutters the waterfall for everyone else

also still have PSK31 in my back pocket, ran it a lot back in the day and it still feels more human than FT8 even if the weak signal performance isnt anywhere close

JS8Call activity definitely depends on time of day and band conditions, 14.078 seems to have the most but ive had decent luck on 7.078 in the evenings especially when 20m is closing down. the community is smaller than FT8 for sure but the people who are on there actually want to talk so the QSO quality is way higher

on the HB9 heartbeats - i turned mine off after a few weeks, it does add noise to the waterfall and honestly i dont think it helps you get more contacts, people just call you when they hear you calling CQ anyway. the heartbeat thing makes more sense if youre doing the relay/mesh stuff where you want nodes to be visible but for regular operating its kind of unnecessary imo

PSK31 is basically dead on most bands now which is sad because i agree with you that theres something about watching that BPSK trace and reading actual words scroll by that FT8 just doesnt have. tried calling CQ on 14.070 a few times last year and got basically nothing

yeah the FT8 hollow feeling is real, my log has like 3000 contacts in it from the last two years and i couldnt tell you a single thing about any of those operators lol. its great for DXCC chasing but thats about where my enthusiasm for it ends

havent tried JS8Call yet but you're making me want to. does it need a pretty clean audio setup or is it forgiving like FT8 is? my shack audio has always been kind of a mess with ground loop issues and i never fully sorted it out