so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for weak signal contacts and filling the logbook but honestly it feels like pushing buttons more than operating. somebody in my club mentioned JS8Call and said its like FT8 but you can actually talk to people and i finally installed it last weekend.

first impression is that its... a lot. like theres a lot going on in the interface and im not totally sure im configured right because i see decodes coming in but nobody seems to respond when i call. running about 50w into a dipole on 40m, same setup i use for FT8 with no issues there. JS8 seems to decode okay, i can see stations, just not making contacts.

also been messing with PSK31 a little bit which i actually kind of love because it feels more like a real QSO but the band seems pretty dead for it these days compared to even a few years ago i think? or maybe im just on at the wrong times. anyway curious if anyone uses JS8 regularly and whether theres a trick to actually getting responses or if its just a smaller pool of operators

JS8Call has a pretty small but dedicated user base compared to FT8, that's just the reality of it. the thing people miss at first is that its not really designed like FT8 where you just call CQ and wait for a response in a structured sequence. its more like a store-and-forward mesh chat thing, so a lot of the activity is asynchronous. people leave their stations running and messages get relayed, sometimes you'll come back an hour later and have replies queued up.

for actually getting responses in real time you want to watch for the heartbeat beacons and reply to those, or hang out in the @ALLCALL group messages. also 40m JS8 activity tends to cluster around 7078 kHz give or take, make sure you're parked in the right spot. the offset in WSJT-X and JS8Call can bite you if you're not careful about where your dial frequency is vs where the activity actually is.

PSK31 yeah its quieter than it used to be, not dead though. 14070 on 20m still has some life especially on weekends, and if you catch a contest like the PSK31 Speedtest there's actually a decent pileup. RTTY contesting still draws people to digital too which is nice.

honestly same experience here when i first tried JS8, sat there for like an hour thinking my radio was broken or something. turns out i had the wrong heartbeat interval set and wasnt actually transmitting as often as i thought. check your settings for the transmission interval, theres a normal and slow and turbo mode and i had mine set weird.

also just to throw it out there — FT4 is worth trying if you want something faster than FT8 but still weak signal capable. its basically the same thing but the sequences are shorter so a full QSO takes less time. doesnt feel much more like a conversation but for contest-style operating its pretty fun