so ive been trying to get winlink working for a while now and i think i finally understand most of it but the RMS gateway part is still kind of fuzzy to me. like i get that you need a gateway station nearby to relay your messages out to the internet but im not totally clear on whether i should be trying to connect to an RMS express relay vs a telnet session vs whatever else is in that dropdown. ive been running vara HF on my IC-7300 and i can see a few gateways in my area when i do the channel selector thing but half the time it just times out or gives me a weird error about the connection

also not sure if this matters but im running through a SignaLink USB and i had to mess with the audio levels for a while before vara would even decode anything. got it mostly dialed in now i think. the bigger question is whether my messages are actually sitting in a queue somewhere waiting to go out or if they just disappear when a session fails. had a message to my wife i was testing with and it never showed up in her inbox, dunno if it got lost or if it just hasnt gone through yet

any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys seem to know this stuff way better than the youtube videos do

okay so a few things here. the telnet option is basically just connecting over the internet directly to a winlink CMS server, so that kind of defeats the purpose if you're trying to do actual radio email. you want vara HF or vara FM or packet depending on what you're doing. for HF with the 7300 vara HF is the right call, just make sure your audio levels in vara are showing a clean signal, not peaking out. there's a little meter in vara itself and you want it in the green not slamming red

for the failed sessions, yeah messages do stay in your outbox until they successfully get posted to a CMS. so if it timed out before completing the handshake they're still sitting there waiting. you can also check the session logs in winlink express, its under the menu somewhere, and itll tell you if the transfer actually completed or not. the channel selector is decent but honestly i usually just pick a gateway i know is active and try a few frequencies manually. some of those listed gateways havent been on the air in months

had the exact same issue when i was starting out, the signalink levels drove me crazy. what finally worked for me was setting the signalink TX knob pretty low, like around 9 oclock, and then adjusting from there while watching the ALC on the radio. you really dont want ALC movement at all with vara or any of the digital modes, it'll trash the signal. once i backed off the drive everything clicked into place and i started actually completing sessions

the gateway thing is just trial and error honestly. some days a gateway thats 300 miles away works better than one in the next county. propagation is propagation