okay so ive been trying to get winlink working for a couple weeks now and i think i finally understand most of it but theres one thing thats still tripping me up. when i open winlink express and look at the channel picker it shows me a bunch of RMS stations and im not sure when i should be connecting directly to one of those versus using a peer to peer session. my situation is im running a IC-7300 into a signalink usb, got vara HF installed and the modem is working fine because i tested it with the vara soundcard test utility. so the RF side seems okay.

what im confused about is the whole relay thing. like if i send a message to a winlink gateway and it gets relayed through another station before hitting the internet, does that add any delays or is it basically instant once it hits any RMS node? and do i need to do anything special to configure my hybrid network settings or does winlink express just figure that out automatically. also not sure if i should even bother with telnet sessions for testing or if that defeats the purpose since id want it to work when the internet is actually down.

been reading the winlink.org documentation but honestly it raises more questions than it answers sometimes, anyone been through this setup recently and have some pointers

the relay question is a good one and it confused me too when i was setting this up last year. basically the RMS nodes you see in the channel picker are all internet-connected gateways, so when you connect to any of them your message hits the winlink common message server pretty much instantly, no meaningful delay. the relay path in the old packet days was different but with vara HF youre usually connecting direct to an RMS gateway not bouncing through a bunch of digipeaters or anything like that.

the peer to peer stuff is a completely separate mode and thats really for when there genuinely is no internet, like you and another station can exchange messages directly without any gateway involved at all, but neither of you get to the outside world that way. its good for local emcomm exercises and stuff but dont confuse it with normal gateway operation.

for testing yeah go ahead and use telnet sessions, thats exactly what theyre there for. lets you make sure your message templates are right and your address book works before you go trying to make RF connections. just remember to switch back to RF when youre actually testing your radio path or it doesnt prove anything about your station capability. hybrid network is fine at defaults honestly, express handles most of that logic for you.

one thing nobody told me when i was starting out with this - make sure your system clock is accurate, like within a few seconds. vara is pretty tolerant but i had a situation where my connections kept dropping partway through a session and it turned out my windows clock had drifted by almost a minute and a half. NTP sync fixed it immediately. probably not your problem but worth checking before you go too far down the troubleshooting rabbit hole