开云体育

I'm kind of excited to announce the club has been given the go ahead to shift our packet radio station on the 400' HHS tower to a Winlink Gateway running VARA-FM (callsign W0AYE-10).
I was able to locate the Kenwood TKR-750 radio programming software and with lots of help from Tony WD0HXV, we were able to reprogram it with 16 frequencies in the 2m digital portion of the band.

Presently, it's back on 145.670 (the MN packet freq), but will switch to 145.070 (MN VARA FM freq) when Ben W0AYE connects his gateway to the radio.

With 50 Watts 400' up, we should be able to solidly serve our present and new users over a much wider area.

Purpose:
Winlink VARA will allow it's users to send and receive emails including attachments up to 100k via 2m voice radios and a Windows pc with free software.
They can also transfer mail and larger files directly between two stations using a peer to peer mode.
It's very automatic and fast!?
This isn't meant to replace your present email, but to give you another way to connect to the rest of the world. I use mine for anything Ham related.
That way, I stay proficient in it's use and spread the word with my @winlink.org address.

There is also a separate VARA Chat program that lets two stations keyboard and transfer files as well.
While sending and receiving email may seem old hat, remember, we are doing it over radio, quickly - look Mom, no wires!

Stay tuned...
73
Mike N0QBH

Ahead of the gateway move to the HHS 400' tower both Mike N0QBH and I will be testing various functions and settings on the N0QBH-10 and W0AYE-10 gateways. Mike's gateway is Radio Only and will not pass messages to the internet at this time. Messages that are sent to the N0QBH-10 gateway will only be able to be retrieved by local users that have a good connection to the gateway. Testing on the W0AYE-10 gateway should not affect regular use or passing of traffic.

After we did some email testing using three different user stations, it was clear the stand alone post office worked as advertised.
It's a Winlink mode that we could employ if some catastrophe takes out the Internet access to the gateway.
Like Ben explained earlier, in this mode, the gateway also becomes the message server to any Winlink user in range.
This is one of the reasons the HHS 400' site is a key player in how we plan to stay connected to our people in an emergency.??

I've taken my temporary gateway down and have returned my station to normal use as N0QBH and digi is? N0QBH-4.
One more step in the move to high places :)

73
Mike N0QBH