okay so ive been messing with Winlink Express for about two weeks now and i think i finally understand the basics but theres one thing that keeps tripping me up. when i do a session and pick "Winlink HF Hybrid Network" or whatever, how do i know if im going through an actual RF gateway or just falling back to telnet over the internet? like is there a way to force it to only use RF so i can actually test if my setup is working on-air?

my setup is a 7300 running into a SignaLink on VARA HF, been using the auto-connect thing but half the time i cant tell if im even hitting an RMS station or just sneaking through the internet and cheating myself out of the real test. my antenna situation isnt great (attic dipole, dont ask) so im wondering if thats why it keeps falling back or if theres something wrong with my config. callsign is in my profile, im in the midwest so there should be decent RMS coverage but maybe not on 40m at this hour idk

also slightly related - if i want to eventually set up my own RMS gateway someday, do i need a dedicated machine for that or can winlink express run as a gateway on the same PC i use for normal operations? saw some conflicting info on the winlink.org docs

yeah the hybrid network thing confuses a lot of people at first. basically Winlink Express will try RF first if you have a channel selected, but if the propagation is garbage or your timing is off it'll silently fall back to CMS over internet. if you want to force RF-only you need to go into the session settings and specifically choose "Vara HF" or "Pactor" or whatever modem you're using as a dedicated session type instead of the hybrid option. that way it wont fall back and if the connection fails it just fails, which is actually what you want for testing purposes.

the attic dipole might honestly be fine depending on your band and time of day, 40m in the midwest you should be hitting something. pull up the RMS list on winlink.org and look at what stations are showing recent activity near your grid square, then manually enter that frequency rather than letting it scan. the auto channel scan takes forever and sometimes locks onto a station that's technically in range but has a horrible path.

for your gateway question - technically yes you can run RMS Relay on the same machine but it's kind of a pain and they really do recommend a dedicated setup, especially if you want it to run 24/7. the sysop software (RMS Packet or RMS Trimode depending on what you're doing) needs the radio to itself basically. lots of people run it on a cheap mini PC or an old laptop they had lying around.

to add to what the other guy said, there's actually a session log in Winlink Express that'll tell you exactly what happened during a connection attempt. after you run a session go look at the log window and it'll show you whether it connected via CMS direct (internet) or through an RMS gateway by callsign. if you see an actual callsign in there like W5XX-10 or whatever you hit a real gateway, if it just says CMS you went through the internet. took me a while to find that log but its super useful for exactly this kind of debugging.