so ive been messing with Winlink Express for a few weeks now and i think i have it mostly working but im genuinely not sure if my messages are going out over RF or just falling back to telnet and i cant tell the difference from the UI half the time

my setup is an IC-7300 fed into Winlink Express through a SignaLink USB, running VARA HF. i configured a session for VARA HF and i can see it connecting to what i think is an RMS gateway but the progress window goes by fast and i dont know if thats actually hitting a local gateway over the air or if its sneaking out through the internet because my firewall isnt set up right or something

also the whole RMS vs CMS thing is confusing me. my understanding is the RMS is the RF gateway node run by someone locally, and the CMS is the central message store in the cloud basically, and when i connect via RF im hitting the RMS which then forwards to CMS. is that right? and if i want to actually test real RF-only operation for say an emergency comms scenario, do i just... turn off my internet and see if it still works? that feels like the obvious answer but i wanted to make sure before i do something dumb

also not sure how message handling works when you're the gateway operator. my buddy down the road is talking about setting up his own RMS gateway and i told him i'd help but neither of us really knows what the Sysop side looks like

yeah your understanding of RMS vs CMS is pretty much correct. the RMS is the over-the-air gateway that volunteers run, and it just acts as a relay - your radio connects to it on HF or VHF, it passes your message up to the CMS servers over internet, and the CMS holds it until someone picks it up. the RMS itself doesnt really store anything long term.

for checking if youre actually going RF, easiest thing is exactly what you said - kill the internet and try a session. if it connects and transfers mail youre hitting the gateway over the air. if it just sits there timing out, it was probably falling back to telnet the whole time. you can also go into the session settings and make sure the connection method is set to VARA HF and not "Telnet to RMS" which is a separate option that just goes straight over internet and kind of defeats the whole point for emcomm purposes

for your buddy setting up his own gateway, he needs to register as a Sysop on the winlink.org site, get the RMS software (RMS Trimode or just RMS Packet depending on what mode he wants to run), and point it at his radio. the Sysop side isnt too bad honestly, main thing is keeping the forwarding schedule running so messages dont pile up. winlink.org has a gateway list and propagation maps so you can see what other gateways are active near you - useful for testing

one thing that tripped me up early on - in Winlink Express there's actually a "Vara HF Winlink" session type and a separate "Vara HF P2P" session type and they behave pretty differently. the Winlink one goes through an RMS gateway, P2P is direct radio to radio without any gateway at all which is handy for certain emcomm drills where you just need two stations talking to each other without any infrastructure. worth knowing about even if you dont need it right now