so ive been trying to get winlink going for a few weeks now and i think im close but something is off with the RMS gateway selection. im running pat on a raspberry pi connected to a signalink USB on my IC-7300, mostly trying to hit the VHF packet gateways around here before i mess with HF. the software connects fine and i can see a bunch of gateways in the list but half the time when i try to connect to one it just times out or gives me a weird error about the session not being acknowledged

i checked the frequency and offset on the gateway listing and it matches what i have dialed in, and the signalink levels look okay to me. VARA FM is installed and pat sees it. my callsign and password are definitely right because i can log into winlink.org just fine. just not sure if this is an RF problem, a software config thing, or if those gateways are just down. is there a way to check which gateways are actually active before you try to connect? feels like im throwing darts blindfolded

also should i be using VARA FM vs plain old packet (AX.25) for VHF? someone told me VARA is faster but im not sure if all the local gateways support it

yeah the gateway status thing is actually something a lot of people run into. if you go to winlink.org and click on RMS stations you can filter by frequency band and mode and it'll show you the last time each gateway checked in with the CMS. anything that hasnt checked in within like an hour or two during normal operating hours is probably down or the sysop is doing maintenance. thats the first thing i check now before wasting time trying to connect

on the VARA FM vs packet question — VARA is way faster if the gateway supports it and your path is clean, like sometimes dramatically faster for anything more than a tiny message. but a lot of the older gateways around me are still just running Direwolf on a TNC-Pi or whatever and those are AX.25 only. check the gateway listing, it'll tell you what modes each one supports. if you see a gateway listed as VARA FM capable and it checked in recently, try that one first. just make sure your VARA FM is actually registered or youre gonna hit the speed cap which is annoying but it'll still work

also double check your squelch isnt killing the tail end of packets, that bit me for a while

the timeout thing with RMS gateways on VHF is almost always either the gateway being legitimately offline or an audio level issue on your end. the signalink has a transmit level pot and a lot of people either crank it too high thinking more is better (its not, you'll overdrive the radio's audio input and smear everything) or they have it too low and the gateway just never decodes your connect request. id spend some time with something like direwolf on the receive side just to confirm you can actually decode packets off the air first, that way you know your receive chain works before troubleshooting transmit

also pat is solid but make sure youre on a recent version, some older builds had weird issues with the VARA interface timing out before the handshake completed