so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think im close but the RMS gateway stuff is tripping me up. i have Winlink Express installed and i can see gateways in the list but im not sure if im supposed to connect to the closest one geographically or if theres some other logic to it. some of them show really low frequency offsets and some show high, does that matter for HF connects?

also when i send a message is it sitting in a queue somewhere on the gateway or does it go straight to the winlink.org servers? i ask because i sent a test message to my own callsign three days ago and it never showed up in my inbox. did the session complete successfully i guess is what im wondering, i saw the green progress bar thing fill up but then nothing came through. running a signalink with an IC-7300 on 40m, pat software actually no wait i switched back to Winlink Express. anyway any help appreciated

the gateway selection thing confused me too when i first started. basically any gateway that shows a solid connection in your area should work, geographic proximity matters more on VHF/UHF but on HF you can hit gateways pretty far away. what you want to check is whether the session actually completed - Winlink Express logs everything and if the transfer finished you should see a "messages sent" confirmation in the session log window. if it just shows connected then dropped that's your problem.

the message flow goes from your station to the RMS gateway node, that node then forwards to the CMS (common message server) which is basically the winlink backbone up in the cloud. so theres two hops basically. if the RMS-to-CMS link is flaky your message can get stuck. check the session log, its under the menu somewhere, look for any error codes. also make sure your clocks are synced because Winlink is picky about time skew and will reject sessions if your system clock is off by more than a minute or so.

yeah what he said about the logs. also one thing i ran into with the 7300 and signalink combo - make sure your audio levels arnt clipping, i had the same symptom where the bar would fill up and look fine but the other end was getting garbage because i had the signalink dial cranked too high. the waterfall on the gateway side just looked like a blob. turned it down to like 40% and suddenly everything started working. might not be your issue but worth checking