Rag Chewer

yeah the room acoustics thing is no joke. i spent like two months tweaking equalizer settings and mic gain before someone finally told me my shack basically sounded like a bathroom and no amount of EQ fixes that. moved some stuff around and put a cheap foam panel behind me and suddenly everyone said i sounded way better without changing a single radio setting.
also one thing — are you sure your ALC is behaving? if the ALC is pegging constantly your audio is gonna sound compressed and kinda strangled. there's a meter for it on the 7300, worth watching while you talk and making sure it's not just pinned the whole time. you want it barely touching on peaks not sitting there maxed out

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is just stupid good, worked a ZL station last week on 20m with like -18dB SNR which still blows my mind. but the whole thing feels like watching a slot machine. you click a callsign, exchange grid squares, 73, done. theres no... conversation.
someone in my local club mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically FT8 but you could actually type messages back and forth. so i installed it and have been poking around on 40m mostly but i cant really figure out if anyone is actually using it for ragchews or if its just people sending automated heartbeat beacons at each other. the waterfall looks busy enough but every time i try to call CQ i get nothing or just an automated ping back from someones node.
is there like a specific time or freq people actually hang out on JS8Call and hold real QSOs? or is the mode just kinda dying out? also wondering how the weak signal performance compares to FT8 since i assume the longer transmit windows hurt you there. my setup is nothing special, IC-7300 and a dipole up about 30 feet.

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and filling in the log but honestly it feels more like a video game than actual radio sometimes. you click a callsign, the macros do everything, you get a confirmation in LOTW and thats it. no real exchange, nothing.
started messing around with JS8Call a few months ago and its a totally different vibe. like you actually type stuff to people. i worked a guy in Montana last week during a really rough band opening on 40m and we had an actual back and forth conversation, signal was only like -18dB and it was totally readable. that kind of thing just doesnt happen on SSB when the bands marginal.
my question is whether anyone is actually using it regularly enough that theres activity on the calling frequencies or if its kind of a ghost town. i tune around and sometimes i see a few relayed messages and occasional beacons but actual live QSOs seem rare. also curious if anyone has compared it to Winlink for emergency comms purposes since the store and forward thing in JS8Call seems interesting but i dont fully understand how reliable it is versus a proper Winlink gateway setup.

honestly the memorization approach works better than most people expect, at least for passing the test. i wont pretend i fully understood every question about chebyshev filters or whatever when i took mine, but if you grind through the question pool enough times the patterns start sticking. that said i did find that understanding even a rough conceptual version of whats going on with things like skin effect or the smith chart made it way easier to remember the right answers, because its not just random anymore it actually makes a little sense.
the extra segments are genuinely useful if you do any contesting or if you want to work DX stations that tend to hang around the edges of the bands where the pileups are a bit thinner. on 40m especially that extra sliver near the bottom is nice. whether its worth it for casual SSB use i mean thats kind of up to you but i dont regret it at all, the process of studying made me a better operator even if some of the theory went over my head.

This was my first SET and I was nervous about making mistakes, but everyone was super supportive. Caution is good, but don't let it prevent you from participating and volunteering. Everyone makes mistakes on their first try, or first dozen tries, and everyone survives them. You will find that most other hams will be sympathetic and supportive of your efforts.

the 991A as a second radio is probably not helping you — the receive audio on that thing has a bit of lag in the DSP chain compared to the 7300 and when you're trying to do fast S&P on radio 2 that slight sluggishness adds up. not saying it wont work but if you ever get a chance to try something like an older Icom or a dedicated second contest radio youll notice the difference. anyway thats kind of a tangent.
for the mental load thing i found it helps a lot to be really strict early on about WHEN you even look at radio 2. like dont touch it mid-exchange, only use it during your own CQ transmission window. sounds obvious but i kept breaking my own rule because i could hear a juicy mult on the second radio and id try to work it at the wrong moment and then miss my own callsign coming back. just takes discipline and eventually it becomes automatic

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is just stupid good, worked a ZL station last week on 20m with like -18dB SNR which still blows my mind. but the whole thing feels like watching a slot machine. you click a callsign, exchange grid squares, 73, done. theres no... conversation.
someone in my local club mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically FT8 but you could actually type messages back and forth. so i installed it and have been poking around on 40m mostly but i cant really figure out if anyone is actually using it for ragchews or if its just people sending automated heartbeat beacons at each other. the waterfall looks busy enough but every time i try to call CQ i get nothing or just an automated ping back from someones node.
is there like a specific time or freq people actually hang out on JS8Call and hold real QSOs? or is the mode just kinda dying out? also wondering how the weak signal performance compares to FT8 since i assume the longer transmit windows hurt you there. my setup is nothing special, IC-7300 and a dipole up about 30 feet.

yeah done almost exactly this with a uno actually, though the mega would give you more i/o headroom which is probably fine. the ic-7300 does output band data on the acc connector, its a set of logic lines that go high or low depending on the band — theres a table in the manual, page like 19 or something. you can read those directly into the arduino digital pins, just watch your voltage levels, the 7300 runs at 3.3v on those pins so dont go connecting straight to 5v arduino inputs without a level shifter or you might have a bad day eventually.
the relay module approach works fine, i used one of those sainsmart 8ch boards. only thing i'd say is put some snubber diodes on the relay coils if they arent already there, the back-EMF can mess with the arduino in weird ways especially if your wiring is sloppy like mine was at first. took me like two weeks to figure out why my arduino kept resetting randomly during transmit.
pi is overkill for pure switching logic imo. arduino is perfect for this, boots instantly, no OS to worry about, just does its thing. save the pi for something where you actually need linux or networking.

yeah im planning to be there, usually get there right when the gates open around 7 because the good deals are gone by 8:30 honestly. the tailgate guys sometimes show up even earlier to set up so if you walk the lot before the main hall opens thats where the real finds are. last year some guy had a pile of old Kenwood stuff he just wanted gone before he had to load it back in the truck lol
the fox hunt thing is worth doing if youve never tried it, our club did one at the spring picnic and it took me embarassingly long to find the thing even with a tape measure yagi