so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for logging contacts and chasing DX but honestly after a while it starts feeling like youre just exchanging signal reports with robots. like there's no actual communication happening, just macros firing back and forth until you get a 73 and move on.

started messing around with JS8Call a few months back because i wanted something that could actually let me type a real sentence to somebody. the weak signal performance is still pretty solid — not quite FT8 territory but way better than PSK31 on a bad band day. my issue is that activity levels are pretty thin, especially on 40m during the day where i used to find a lot of FT8 traffic. i found a handful of regulars on the JS8Call nets but it's definitely more work to find someone to ragchew with.

curious if anyone here has done a serious comparison of the two in terms of actual on-air time. like do you find js8call worthwhile enough to keep the rig dedicated to it or do you just fire it up occasionally. also wondering how it stacks up against the old PSK31 crowd — i know PSK is basically dead in some parts of the band but there's still some activity on 20m around 14.070 if you know where to look.

not trying to start a whole FT8 is ruining ham radio debate, i actually like FT8 for what it is, just wondering if the js8call experiment is worth sticking with

yeah JS8Call scratches a totally different itch than FT8. i think of FT8 as more like a propagation tool that happens to let you log contacts, and JS8Call as an actual messaging system that happens to work on marginal band conditions. theyre not really competing for the same use case imo.

i run JS8Call mostly on 40m in the evenings and yeah activity is sparse compared to the FT8 watering holes but the people who ARE there tend to actually want to talk. i've had some pretty good keyboard-to-keyboard QSOs with guys i now check in with regularly. the store-and-forward relay stuff is kind of underutilized but when it works its genuinely impressive — sent a message through two relays once when 40m wasnt making it direct and it got there maybe 20 minutes later.

PSK31 i still load up occasionally more out of nostalgia than anything. the activity is there if you're patient and the real-time typing feel is nice, but you need a better signal path than JS8Call for sure. on a rough band day PSK31 will fall apart where JS8Call is still pulling through. so for weak signal ragchewing JS8Call wins pretty easily in my experience.

honestly i tried js8call twice and both times just sat there for like 45 minutes hearing nothing so i went back to ft8. maybe im on the wrong frequencies or wrong time of day idk. what dial frequency are you guys actually finding activity on 40m