Winlink

I'm still having trouble getting a good signal here in the yard, but I did make some progress with the radio and Winlink. My little dipole doesn't seem to be working very well. I can hear some stations, e.g., weather, but not really anything else. I'll work on it more tomorrow.

As I mentioned before, I have a Pactor modem, but would prefer to use my sound card and the new WINMOR and RMS Express programs developed by Winlink -- simpler, with fewer things to break down. I downloaded them today and was able to connect via telnet and send and receive messages. RMS Express is still pretty bare bones. It doesn't have built in position reporting or an automated GPS feed, so I had to figure out how to do that manually.

I tried to search the Winlink site and the web, but couldn't find an example. Finally, I searched the help file for Airmail, the older email client used with the Pactor modems, and found an example. Although I had to type it in myself, I was able to send in a position report and am now visible on the Winlink User Position Reports Map -- just open it up and look for my call sign, NV5L.

Btw, here's the message I sent:

Message ID: X2V1MPMK1R6Q
Date: 2010/12/30 01:34
From: NV5L
To: QTH
Source: NV5L
Subject: //WL2K POSITION REPORT

TIME: 30 Dec 2010 01:32
LATITUDE: 40-50.5N
LONGITUDE: 073-46.9W
COMMENT: On the hard at Consolidated on City Island

I guess the secret was to send it to "QTH" and make the subject "POSITION REPORT." The body just has the appropriate fields. However, I think there are some I'm missing, e.g., course and speed, but I'll have to look up the syntax. I think this stuff is on the RMS Express "to do" list, but I'm not sure when that'll be. For now, I don't mind doing it by hand.

Hopefully it won't be too difficult to make up a cable and connect my sound card to the radio. I'll work on that and the antenna tomorrow. It'll really be nice to get all this stuff finally working, and check off one more task.