so ive been messing around with Winlink for the past couple weeks and i finally got a message to go through last night which was exciting but i still feel like im doing half of this wrong and just getting lucky

my setup right now is a Kenwood TS-590SG into a SignaLink USB, running Winlink Express on a pretty old laptop. im using VARA HF as the modem because everyone said to just use VARA. my antenna situation is a dipole up about 35 feet, nothing fancy.

the part that confuses me is the gateway selection. like when i open up the RMS list it shows me a hundred gateways and i have no idea how to pick a good one vs a bad one. i know you're supposed to look at distance and frequency but beyond that i kind of just pick whatever looks active and hope for the best. sometimes i connect, sometimes i sit there watching the VARA waterfall do nothing for five minutes.

also i set up a Winlink account and i guess i have an address now ([email protected]) but what's the actual workflow for like, sending a message to someone who doesn't have Winlink? do they just get a regular email? and if they reply does it come back to me over RF or does it just sit there waiting for me to connect again?

i know this is like four questions in one post but any help appreciated, been reading the docs and they're kind of dense

the gateway thing trips up a lot of people at first. basically the RMS list in Winlink Express is sorted by distance by default but that doesnt mean the closest one is the best connection — propagation on HF doesnt care about distance the same way. what i usually do is pull up the channel selector in VARA and let it scan for a few seconds, it'll show you signal strength on the active RMS freqs and that gives you a much better idea of what's actually workable right now vs what just looks good on paper.

on your other question yeah a non-ham recipient just gets a regular email to whatever address you put in the To field. they reply to it like any email and it queues up on the Winlink servers. next time you connect to any RMS gateway — RF or telnet — your client pulls it down. so yeah the message just sits on the server until you initiate another session. it doesnt push to you, you always have to go get it. that's kind of the whole design, works great for situations where you're operating intermittently or in the field.

one thing i'd add — try 20m during the day and 40m after dark if you're doing domestic stuff in the US, makes a big difference in what gateways you can hit consistently

cant speak to all of that but the VARA free vs paid thing is worth knowing about if you haven't run into it yet. free version throttles your connection speed pretty noticeably, i ran it free for about two months before i finally just paid for the license and honestly the throughput difference is real especially if you're trying to send anything with an attachment. for just basic text messages free is probably fine but wanted to mention it since nobody told me for a while and i kept wondering why transfers were so slow