ok so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for a couple weeks now and i think im close but not quite there. my setup is a ic-7300 running into a signalink usb and im using vara HF for the modem. i can see nearby RMS gateways in the channel picker and i can even watch the waterfall and see what looks like vara traffic going back and forth but when i try to connect i either get nothing or i get partway through the handshake and then it drops.

the part im confused about is whether the RMS gateway i picked is actually online and accepting connections or if its just showing up in the list because it was active recently. i think the propagation map shows the path is ok but i honestly dont fully understand how to read that thing yet. do the gateways go offline sometimes mid-day? or is this more likely an audio level issue on my end. i had the signalink tuned for psk31 before so maybe i need to recalibrate everything for vara.

also not sure if it matters but im trying to do this on 40m, the frequency im using is one ive seen listed in the winlink frequency list so i dont think thats the problem. any ideas what to check first?

yeah the gateway list in the channel selector is not always real time, some of those entries can be hours old depending on when the RMS relay'd its last heartbeat to the winlink servers. the propagation map thing is a rough estimate too, not gospel. best thing to do is check winlink.org directly and look at the gateway status page, you can sort by last heard and see which ones were actually active in the last hour or so.

audio levels with vara are pretty critical and definitely not the same ballpark as what you'd set for psk31. vara HF wants a clean signal without any clipping, i usually run my signalink output low and then bring up the radio power a bit rather than driving it hard from the pc side. there's a built in calibration thing in vara HF if you haven't found it yet, run that before you try connecting again. also make sure your IC-7300 is in USB-D mode not just USB or you might get some weird filtering that steps on the vara bandwidth.

40m can be tricky during the day depending on where the gateways are relative to you, skip zone and all that. i had similar problems and ended up switching to 80m in the afternoons when nothing on 40 would connect. once i actually got a complete session i could see what a good connection looked like and work backwards from there to troubleshoot the bad ones.

one other thing - are you running any other software that might be grabbing the audio device at the same time? had a guy in our club spend three days on this exact issue and it turned out fldigi was still holding the soundcard even though it wasnt open. just something to check.