I've been seeing a lot of FT8 posts lately. I've even tried it out. But, I'm more of a ragchewer than a contester. If you're in that boat too, fire up fldigi and give the Olivia modes a try. I've had perfect copy QSOs when the signal was barely visible in the waterfall. It's similar technology (MFSK with FEC) but you're not constrained to short, templated messages. I find Olivia-8-500 to be a good balance of speed and bandwidth.