Michelle Taylor

so ive had my FT-857D for probably 6 years now and never really touched it beyond the basics. did the TX mod a while back to open up the transmit range which was pretty straightforward but thats about it. lately ive been reading about the Collins filter mod and also swapping out the stock DSP with better filtering and i'm wondering if anyone has actually done this and noticed a real difference on crowded bands.
my main use is HF portable ops and occasional SSB contests so noise floor and adjacent channel rejection matters a lot to me. the stock filter setup has always bothered me a little bit, especially when things get busy around 14.225 and the broadcast splatter is coming in. i know the 857 isnt exactly a high end rig but i feel like theres more in it than yaesu gave us stock.
also considering adding the TCXO-9 if i can find one used, i know some people say it doesnt matter much but for digital modes and working weak signal stuff it seems like it would help. anyway curious what mods people have actually done and whether the juice is worth the squeeze on a rig this old at this point

JS8Call is genuinely worth trying if you actually want to exchange information rather than just log a grid square. the relay functionality does work but you kind of need to be patient and understand that the network is sparse compared to FT8 — you're not going to fire it up and immediately have 40 stations decoding you. on a good evening on 40m i usually see maybe 15-20 stations in the activity window, sometimes more during a net, and ive had actual back and forth conversations that lasted 20-30 minutes which honestly felt more like ham radio to me than FT8 ever did.
the SNR thing is real, JS8Call runs at something like -24dB versus FT8's -21dB or so, so you do give up a little but in practice on 40m with your setup i doubt you'd notice it most of the time. where it starts to matter is on marginal paths or really weak DX type stuff, for that FT8 is still king. but for domestic rag chewing or store-and-forward messaging it's hard to beat. KN4CRD wrote a pretty good summary of the different speed modes (normal, slow, turbo) and when to use each if you search the JS8Call groups.io list.
PSK31 — honestly still some activity on 14.070 area during the day, i worked a handful of stations last month just scanning around. not what it was in like 2010 but not completely dead either. RTTY contest weekends still bring people out too.

yeah that's pretty much how most people run it honestly. N1MM is just so purpose-built for contesting that trying to force Log4OM into that role doesnt really make sense, the exchange logging and rate tracking and all that just isnt the same. i've tried doing contests in other software and you end up fighting the tool instead of working the pile.
the ADIF import thing after the fact is annoying but its not that bad once you set up a filter to check for dupes before you merge. what i do is export from N1MM right after the contest ends, open it in a text editor real quick and check the header info is clean, then import into Log4OM with the duplicate detection set to strict. havent had a serious problem with it in a while. the only time it got weird for me was when i had some FT8 QSOs in Log4OM that also showed up in the contest log because i was running both modes during the same event, that confused things for a bit.

I'm kind of in the same boat, just got my license a few months ago and have been doing POTA activations with a QCX+ on 20m. the kit building part is half the fun for me, sitting there with the instructions and soldering each component in knowing exactly whats in the radio is really satisfying compared to just buying a box off the shelf.
one thing I didn't expect was how much patience CW QRP requires, like you really have to be willing to call CQ a few times and wait. but the pileups when people are hunting you for POTA are actually kind of manageable at low power which is nice, not totally overwhelmed the way i imagine ssb would be. still figuring everything out but yeah the hobby feels way more real to me operating this way than it did just scanning around on a handheld.