so ive been trying to get winlink working for about three weeks now and i think i finally have a handle on it but some stuff still isnt clicking. running vara HF on a IC-7300 into a laptop and i can connect to remote RMS gateways just fine, messages go out and come back no problem. great.

but heres where im confused - i want to also set up my own RMS relay here at home so other local hams can use it. ive got a decent 40m antenna and a separate radio i could dedicate to this. i downloaded RMS relay and poked through the config but i honestly dont understand the relationship between the RMS relay software and the winlink common message server on the backend. like does my local station have to stay connected to the CMS at all times to forward messages or does it cache stuff locally until it can sync? and what happens if my internet drops while someone is connecting through me?

also not sure if i need a separate callsign registration for the gateway itself or if it just runs under my personal callsign with an SSID. ive seen both -10 and -RMS used in the wild and cant figure out if thats a convention thing or actually required by the system

the caching question is a good one, RMS relay does store messages locally so if your internet drops mid-session it should still be able to accept the message and then forward it to the CMS once connectivity comes back. its not real-time in a way that breaks the connection to the client. i ran into this during a storm last year, guy was connecting to my gateway and my ISP hiccuped, he never even noticed and the message got delivered like 20 minutes later when things came back up.

as for the callsign thing you run it under your own callsign. the -10 ssid is just convention for winlink gateways, not technically mandated but its what everybody does and it helps the system know how to route to you. when you register as a sysop through the winlink.org site you do the registration under your call with that SSID and thats what shows up in the channel finder. pretty sure you have to explicitly register as a sysop account on their site before RMS relay will even authenticate with the CMS properly, so do that first if you havent already

yeah i went through this same headache a few months back. one thing that caught me off guard was the firewall stuff - RMS relay needs some specific ports open and i kept getting weird timeout errors and blamed the radio for like a week before i realized windows firewall was just silently blocking things. vara has its own port situation too so make sure both are handled. also depending on your ISP some of them block inbound connections on certain ports which can be a whole other mess if you want people connecting to you from outside your local RF range... actually for a local relay that might not even matter depending on what you're trying to do