[K6BW] Winmore Hints

[Bill Smith]

This may be of interest to those of you who may be experimenting with
Winmor, or are following its development.   Rick Muthing is the author of
Winmor.

What is Winmor?  It is a digital protocol, sound-card based, that is under
development to allow digital transfer of information using radio.  It is a
possible replacement of 1200-baud packet.  Winmor is a little faster, but
the big advantage is that it does not (necessarily) require a hardware
terminal node controller (TNC), but takes advantage of the signal processing
resources of a conventional computer sound card.  Thus only a computer,
cable, radio and antenna are needed to assemble a digital communications
station.

The following is a response emailed by Rick Muthing.  The email was in
response to an individual who is just getting started with using Winmor and
was asking questions
regarding how to install and make Winmor functional.

>If you cannot connect to an RMS WINMOR server it is almost always one of
these issues:
>
> 1) Poor signal. Drive level is important. RF or Noise into the Transmit
audio is problematic. Set the level using the two tone Test to 60% of the
PEP rating using an average reading wattmeter (most are).
>
> 2) Poor propagation. Use the Propagation prediction program in RMS
Express. If a predicted path quality is < 30 it is not likely to work. 45+
should work almost every time.
>
> 3) Be on frequency. Use automatic radio control or set the radio to the
proper dial freq within 100Hz USB.
>
> 4) Reduce your local noise. If your S-meter is reading S9 with noise you
won't hear much. You Receiver AGC should adjust your audio output to remain
nearly constant.it should drive the receive audio level into the green but
not into the red. Audio level is otherwise not critical and there is no
"sweet spot"
>
> 5) If you don't hear the other side chip back to your connect request he
isn't hearing you. That points to either poor propagation or poor transmit
power, antenna or signal distortion at YOUR end.
>
> 6) If you hear the "chirp" back but it still won't connect it could be a
problem with the remote end but not too likely for servers.they generally
have everything pretty well set up. Make sure you have things like Noise
blankers etc turned off and do not have any filters attenuating the WINMOR
signal.
>
>
> WINMOR is now working for thousands of users so the basic software is
pretty well rung out.
> 73 and Good luck,
> Rick KN6KB