so ive been messing with Winlink for about three weeks now and i finally got Vara FM working on 2m through a local RMS gateway, at least i think i did. the connection handshake completes and Winlink Express shows the session as connected but when i compose a message and hit send it just sits in the outbox forever. no error, no transfer, just nothing.

my setup is an IC-9700 into a SignaLink USB, vara fm set to the right audio levels i think, and im hitting W3XYZ-10 which is about 12 miles away and usually has good activity. ive seen other people connect to it on the winlink map so i know the gateway is up.

im wondering if its an audio level thing or maybe i have the TNC mode set wrong in Express. also not sure if i need to do anything special in the message handling settings to get it to actually push the message during the session or if it does that automatically once you're connected. probably something dumb im missing.

yeah that symptom usually points to the session completing before the message transfer actually kicks off. one thing to check - in Winlink Express make sure your message is actually queued and not just saved as a draft. sounds obvious but the compose window and the send queue are separate and a lot of people catch themselves on that one. also check that you have "send on connect" enabled in the settings, think its under tools somewhere.

the other thing with Vara FM specifically is the TX delay. if your radio isnt fully keyed up before Vara starts sending data the gateway never gets a clean header and it just drops the session silently. try bumping your PTT delay up to like 150ms or even 200ms and see if that changes anything. SignaLink adds a little latency too so you might need more than you'd think.

IC-9700 with SignaLink is a slightly weird combo honestly, that radio has built in USB audio so a lot of people just go straight USB without the SignaLink and have better results. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth knowing. ive run Vara FM on mine direct USB and it just works once you sort out the com ports.

also just to double check - you do have the RMS gateway frequency dialed in exactly right yeah? some of those gateways run offset from what the winlink map shows or they updated and nobody changed the listing. i got burned by that once, was connecting to what i thought was one gateway and was actually hitting a dead node that still had the handshake running somehow. the Winlink RF network map is usually pretty good but not always current.