so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for working new entities and the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive but i honestly feel like im just clicking buttons and watching a waterfall. theres no actual communication happening. read somewhere that JS8Call is supposed to fix that - like you can actually type messages back and forth but still get the weak signal advantage of the WSJT-X style encoding or whatever.

problem is every time i tune around on the JS8Call freqs it feels pretty dead. maybe im looking in the wrong places or wrong times. i run a KX3 into a wire antenna so im not exactly a powerhouse station but ive worked plenty of stuff on FT8 with it. curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its kind of a ghost town. also wondering how it compares to just running PSK31 which i used to do all the time back before FT8 took over everything and at least felt like a real qso

JS8Call is definitely thinner on activity than FT8, thats just the reality of it. but its not dead either, you just have to know where to look. 14.078 USB is probably your best bet on 20m and there tends to be a cluster of activity in the mornings US time. the thing is JS8Call attracts a different kind of operator - people who actually want to pass traffic or have a slow ragchew, so the population is smaller but the qsos are way more satisfying imo.

the latency does take some getting used to. each transmission is like 15 seconds minimum so a back and forth exchange takes a while but the copy you get at genuinely low signal levels is remarkable. ive had conversations with guys running 5 watts into attic antennas that i never would have heard on PSK31. i still fire up PSK31 occasionally for nostalgia but honestly the band has to be in decent shape for it to work reliably anymore with all the noise floors people are dealing with.

yeah JS8Call can feel slow when youre used to FT8 but thats kinda the point i guess. i tried it last winter during some contests when 20m was getting crowded and just wanted something different. had a solid 45 minute exchange with a guy in finland which honestly felt more like ham radio than anything ive done in a while. KX3 should be totally fine for it btw, the mode doesnt care about power nearly as much as antenna efficiency and even then it'll punch through a lot.