This has been a long time coming. I've been planning on creating a relatively permanent station running JS8Call on 40 meters for many months now, but like many of my other projects it kept getting pushed off in lieu of higher priority projects. Now that I have a second desk in my office I was able to justify the horizontal real estate to dedicate to such a station.

Comfy permanent 40M JS8 station
Comfy permanent 40M JS8 station

After suspending up a 40M End Fed Halfwave antenna between my office window and an extendable fly fishing rod attached to my fence, I fired up the radio to check out the background noise. Right, that's why I didn't want to try to set up a station in suburban hell. My radio is picking up anywhere between S8 and S+ background noise at all hours of the day.

The pain of suburban hell as a ham
The pain of suburban hell as a ham

Despite these limitations, I'm still able to make a great deal of contacts due to JS8Call's amazing decoding software. Most nights I'm able to see stations as far as the eastern sea board, and once I saw an Australian station's signal come through in the very early hours of the morning.
Next time a power outage comes through my neighborhood (which will likely kill all the background noise) I'll be very interested in seeing how my station performs. Hopefully such an event will occur at night.

Side note: The bug-fix I submitted to the JS8Call team was accepted and made it into the latest JS8Call software (version 2.3.1). Although this was a small bug that I'll bet no one but a handful of people noticed, it feels good to contribute to a project that I know sees a lot of use (plus this was my first ever contribution to an open source project). I'm hoping to contribute more to the as time moves on, provided that the rest of my project list is cleaned up first (it probably will never be).

Regardless, feel free to reach out via 40M if you wish to send me a message (propagation is always better at night).