Winlink Express [a.k.a. RMS Express]

[Budd Churchward]

I thought it was time to push the envelope a little further so I decided to get email running on my packet station. I chatted with Basil, N7NIX, using APRS Messaging and he pointed me in the right direction. I have two choices. I am running a RasPi and a UDRC which gives me the Linux solution with PacLink. Using the Win7 machine I can use WinLink Express. Basil recommended the Windows solution for now because PacLink is much more difficult to configure and get running.

I'm getting pretty brave about linking the two platforms together on my LAN and decided that I should give Winklink a try, but run it back through the RasPi and Direwolf and the UDRC to my radio.

The Winlink.org website had all the files ready for me to download and unzip. That went well. There is a little application in the folder called: 'RMS Link Test.exe' that pinged a bunch of RMS servers around the planet and told me right away that I had good connections to all of them. There is a set of videos on the site that walked me through all of the set up. I had to set up an account to get going and what I had on my screen did not match well with the images in the video. It looked like I was up against a 'Catch-22' in that I had to enter my Winlink email address in order to set up a password and get a Winlink email address. That had me stymied for a bit. I saw it as an impossible loop. What the video didn't show was that there is a place for a 'fallback' email address that you can use if the Winlink connections fail. So when I said 'send me a password,' it worked anyway. The password it sent me was the same one I had entered into the application. I had to enter my home address in the program and I think they compared that with the FCC data base to authenticate my call. I know they did, because they came back and said my name was Warren! Only the FCC knows my name is Warren.

The next challenge was getting the app to find my RasPi and the Direwolf TNC. I told the software that I had a KISS TNC and the box that wanted to know my COM port, expanded and allowed me to select TCP. I put in the Pi's IP and port 8001, which is what Direwolf says I should do and it simply failed. It could not connect to Direwolf. So I tried Direwolf's other port, 8000, which is the wrong one and of course that didn't work either. Still muddled, I said what the heck, and put it back to 8001, where I started, and Badda Bing! It was 'OK Houston, we have a go.'

I tried to link into the Blaine RMS Gateway but that path wasn't too good for me. It is only 4 miles away, but I'm hiding at the bottom of a steep hill and the gateway is north of me. So I chose VE7RFY-10 which has an RMS Gateway on UHF. It's over 30 miles southwest of me, high on a hill near Victoria. I have no trouble hitting the same site on VHF APRS Packet. It was a solid connection and I was sending and receiving emails right away.

BTW I have been looking at the raw data on a lot of our guys' APRS packets (you can do that on aprs.fi) and see that most of us have a real good path to VE7RFY-10.

So that's what I did on this rainy day, today. I am not going to be able to do the Sumas exercise that Andy is putting together tomorrow. We have family here all day. I will try to see if I can copy some packets, though. I was copying packets direct form KF7VOL-1 when Andy was driving around the hills last week. 

So if you want to send me an email to my Winlink station, the address is: WB7...@Winlink.org ... The subject MUST start with: '//WL2K' or it will be rejected as spam.

73

[Robert Sears]

First off I have to say Direwolf certainly makes life easy!
It was no problem setting up Winlink Express to use the networked Pi/UDRC setup.

Anyway this is where I am having difficulty, I can connect to the Winlink servers but always get this error message.

*** Calling W7BPD-10
*** Connected to W7BPD-10 at 2016/10/09 05:32:15

[WL2K-3.2-B2FWIHJM$]
*** Not a valid peer-to-peer connection - disconnecting
*** Incoming SID is invalid: [WL2K-3.2-B2FWIHJM$]
*** Disconnecting due to timeout
*** Ready
*** Disconnected at 2016/10/09 05:32:24
*** Ready

*** Calling W7ECG-10
*** Connected to W7ECG-10 at 2016/10/09 05:38:15

[WL2K-3.2-B2FWIHJM$]
*** Not a valid peer-to-peer connection - disconnecting
*** Incoming SID is invalid: [WL2K-3.2-B2FWIHJM$]
*** Disconnecting due to timeout
*** Ready
*** Disconnected at 2016/10/09 05:38:27
*** Ready

Any ideas?

Robert/KF7VOP

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[Robert Sears]

Doh! I had it set to Peer to Peer Packet instead of Winlink Packet.

Works now, just sent Bud a test message.

Robert/KF7VOP