so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and its great for chasing dx and all that but honestly it feels a little hollow sometimes, like you make a contact and then its just... done. logged, bye. i get why people love it for weak signal stuff and the efficiency is insane but i started getting into JS8Call a few weeks ago and its a completely different vibe.

JS8Call feels more like actual communication, you can have a real back and forth even if its slow as hell. i was talking to a guy in alaska for like 45 minutes on 40m last saturday night, signal was marginal the whole time but we kept it going. would have been impossible on SSB from here. the latency is annoying but you kind of get into a rhythm with it.

anyway my actual question is whether anyone runs both regularly and if you have them set up on the same radio somehow without too much hassle. right now im switching cables around which is dumb. running an IC-7300 into a signalink and wsjt-x and js8call are both on the same laptop, just cant have both open at the same time obviously but wondering if theres a smarter way to handle the audio routing so i dont have to physically mess with anything when i switch modes

yeah you're not missing the point at all, they really are just different tools for different things. FT8 is basically a spotting and contact machine, JS8Call is for when you actually want to talk to someone without relying on propagation being perfect.

for the audio routing thing - on windows you can use VB-Audio virtual cable or voicemeeter to route audio between apps without touching hardware. takes a bit of fiddling to get the levels right but once its set up you can switch between wsjt-x and js8call without touching a single cable. the signalink stays connected to the 7300 the whole time, you just tell each program to use the virtual audio device instead of the physical one. i did something similar with my 7300 setup and it took maybe an hour to sort out but works fine now. just make sure you're not running both programs open at the same time or they'll fight over the COM port for PTT anyway.

js8call is underrated for sure. i mostly do ft4 and rtty for contests but i fired up js8call during a power outage scenario our emcomm group was practicing and it was genuinely impressive how well it punched through. we had a net going with four stations, couple of them running qrp, and everyone was readable when ssb would've been a mess.

dont overthink the software routing too much at first honestly, the cable swap is annoying but its not the end of the world until you figure out what workflow actually suits you. some people never bother and just live with it