[CALV-AUXCOMM] Winlink Practice Wendesday, Dec 6th at 8PM

[Shawn Donley]

All,


At our last meeting we decided to practice sending Winlink Packet messages on the evening of Dec 5th.  But since CARA is having an executive board meeting that evening, I'm moving the practice session to Wednesday, Dec 6th beginning at 8 PM local.


We will meet up on the 146.985 repeater and usthe repeater for coordination and help.  The focus of this practice is to send a short Winlink message to other participants via a Winlink Gateway and download any messages by connecting to a gateway.   We'll save peer-to-peer messaging practice for another night.


Local Winlink Packet gateways:


         KB3FWW-10  on 145.750 MHz


         KA3POX-10 on 145.750 MHz


         KA3AHI-10 on 145.750 MHz


         W3CB-10 on 145.750 MHz


         KC3DSO-10 on 145.750 MHz


In Winlink Express, when you open a Winlink Packet session, you can see the table of nearby (to you) gateways by clicking on Channel Selection and then clicking on  Update Table Via Internet.


If you cannot hit one of these gateways directly, try going through on of our 145.750 digipeaters, K3CAL-1 at Mt Hope or K3CAL-10 in Prince Frederick.  They are both up at the time this email is being written.  When you open a Packet Winlink session, at the top of the session window you will see Connection Type where you can select Direct or Digipeater.


A few tips:


1.  When you compose a message, make sure the Send As box on the top of the new message window says Winlink Message (not Radio-Only or Peer-to-Peer).


2.  Remember to save the new message to the Outbox ( "Post to Outbox").


3.  Addressing:   The following assumes you are using Winlink Express and are already recognized by the Winlink system.  All you have to do for adding an addressee in the "To" box is to put in their callsign.  It's NOT necessary to follow the callsign with @winlink.org.   You can add multiple addressee's by separating the callsigns with a semicolon ;

All Winlink addressing is case insensitive.


4.  You can have multiple Winlink messages in your Outbox.  When  you connect to a Gateway, any incoming messages for you will be downloaded,  Then all the messages in your Outbox will be sent.  After this is complete, Winlink Express will automatically disconnect from the Gateway.  If you have any Peer-to-Peer messages in your Outbox, they will NOT be sent unless you open and run a Peer-to-Peer session.  We'll do that later.


5.   A note on spam control .... Since the origin of Winlink is somewhat focuses on delivery of email to vessels at sea, there was concern about spam given the low data transfer rates on HF.  So to prevent spam from making it through, an email sent to a Winlink user FROM the internet had to have the string  //WL2K as the first part of the message's subject line, OR the sender's email address had to be in the recipient's "white list."  See https://www.winlink.org/content/how_manage_your_whitelist_spamcontrol for details.   But when sending from a radio to another Winlink user via a radio gateway, you'll find that the //WL2K string is automatically added to the subject line.


6.  If for whatever reason you can't reach a Gateway by radio from your location, even using a digipeater, feel free to open a Telnet session.  This is sort of cheating because Winlink Express will then reach out to the Winlink message server via the internet (instead of a radio gateway) to retrieve any messages and send any messages in your Outbox.  But that's better than no practice at all. 


Shawn

N3AE