so ive been trying to get winlink going for about two weeks now and im at the point where i just want to throw the laptop out the window. running pat on linux with a signalink usb into my IC-7300, vara fm configured, and i can see the gateway in the map but when i try to connect it just times out every single time. the audio levels look fine to me, the waterfall shows the vara tones going out, but nothing comes back.

thing is the RMS gateway i'm trying to hit is only like 12 miles away, line of sight almost, so its not an rf issue. ive double checked the serial port settings and the ptt is definitely keying up the radio, i can see the tx light. not sure if its a vara configuration thing or if maybe that particular RMS node is just down? is there a way to check gateway status somewhere without just blindly trying to connect?

also slightly confused about the difference between RMS relay and RMS gateway in terms of what i should actually be targeting as a new winlink user. any help appreciated

the winlink.org site has a map where you can click on any gateway and see when it last connected to the CMS servers, that'll tell you pretty quick if the node is actually alive or just sitting there looking pretty on the map. i had the exact same problem with a gateway that showed up fine but hadnt checked in for like 3 days, so yeah check that first before you go nuts reconfiguring everything.

on the vara fm thing, one thing that burned me for a while was the bandwidth setting. make sure you and the gateway are on the same vara fm variant, some run narrow some run wide and they wont talk to each other even if your audio is perfect. also double check your soundcard sample rate in vara's config, windows likes to randomly reset that to something dumb after updates and im assuming linux has its own version of that kind of problem.

as for RMS gateway vs relay, gateways connect directly to the winlink CMS on the internet. relays are for passing traffic through other stations when theres no internet, kind of like a store and forward thing. for getting started just target gateways, much simpler.

yeah the gateway status page on winlink.org is your friend, theres a channel table too that shows frequencies and modes for each station. i spent way too long trying to connect to a gateway that had been offline for weeks because i just assumed anything on the map was active lol.

one other thing worth checking is whether pat is actually passing the right mycall to vara. i had a weird issue where pat was sending it lowercase and vara was choking on it, not sure if thats still a thing but worth a look at the logs. pat has pretty decent logging if you crank up the verbosity.