so ive been trying to get winlink going for a while now, mostly because our ARES group keeps talking about it for emcomm and i feel like the last guy who doesnt have it set up. i got vara fm installed and pat winlink on my linux box and i can connect to a few gateways okay but im not totally sure im doing it right.

my main question is about the RMS gateways - when i look at the winlink.org gateway list theres like hundreds of them and i dont really understand how to pick the right one or if it even matters. i've been just connecting to whatever shows up strongest on my SDR waterfall but is there some logic to it or does the system handle that automatically. also i noticed some gateways are listed as telnet only and i dont want those, just RF ones obviously.

and then the other thing thats been bugging me - when i send a message to another ham do they have to be on winlink too to recieve it or can it go to a regular email address. i thought i saw something about a gateway to the internet but im not sure if thats always available or only when someone has their station up.

running a baofeng into a signalink into my laptop right now which i know isnt ideal but its what i have. getting maybe 20-30 mile range to the nearest gateway which seems okay for now.

yeah so the gateway selection stuff - winlink actually has a feature in the client where it'll automatically find nearby gateways based on your grid square so you dont have to manually hunt. in Winlink Express (are you using that or Pat?) you just set your location and it'll pull a sorted list. but if youre doing it manually the general idea is pick something geographically close, check that it's been active recently (the website shows last heard timestamps), and make sure the mode matches what youre running. vara fm vs packet vs vara hf are all different beasts.

the internet email thing - yes it works, you can send to any regular email address and they'll get it as a normal email. the reply path is a little weird for them but it works. the caveat in a real emcomm situation is if the internet is down at the gateway side then obviously that breaks, which is kind of the whole point of having a mesh of gateways and being able to do store and forward through the RF network only. but day to day, regular email works fine.

baofeng into signalink is totally fine to start, lots of people run that. vara fm will work, just wont be the fastest session in the world but for message traffic it doesnt really matter.

i went through the same confusion a few months ago. one thing that helped me was actually just looking at the RMS gateway map on winlink.org and filtering by mode, so i could see which ones near me were vara fm versus plain old packet. ended up finding a really solid gateway about 18 miles out that i can hit reliably even with my mobile rig sitting on my desk which was a nice surprise.

the message routing is pretty slick once you get your head around it - basically your message sits in a CMS (thats the central message server in the cloud) until the recipient picks it up, so you dont need to have a direct connection to them, just both of you need to connect to any gateway at some point. that's the whole store and forward model. makes it really practical for emcomm because someone can drop a message and go dark and the other end grabs it whenever they connect next.

also worth knowing - if you ever want to run your own RMS gateway its not that complicated, there's a whole winlink RMS software package. our club set one up on a pi with a cheap 2m radio and its been running solid for like two years now, mostly just to give the local ARES guys a reliable local node.