Winlink

It's called FAT.

So it's a play on Pat Winlink.

And Pat is a great program.

I've used it since, you know, before 2000.

Mm-hmm

...

Pat Winlink.

It's basically just one page that has at the top, it just says Inbox, Archive, and a few other actions.

In the exercise, you send a Did You Feel It report to the United States Geological Survey indicating the level of fictional earthquake damage experienced at your location.

These communications are done using Winlink, preferably via radio to an RMS gateway, as you would if local phone and internet services were disrupted in your area.

If you haven't used Winlink before, this would be a great time to try it out.

Or maybe you could try to send a report by other means to a Winlink operator who could relay for you.

There's also a preparedness survey, an earthquake preparedness guide, and a quiz to help you be better prepared for a real emergency if and when it occurs.

The Great Shakeout exercise takes place this Wednesday, the fifteenth of October, at ten fifteen AM, your local time.

yeah.

But my point is that JS8 call and VARA AC are keyboard-to-keyboard over radio, and Winlink is actually email.

Now, you can do email over the air that never hits a gateway.

You can totally do email-to-email over radio.

But generally speaking, Winlink usually hits a gateway somewhere.

So you're emailing your buddy at gmail.com because you're in an area with no internet connection and they're at home or something.

Yeah, so the thing that puts

them apart is I like to say that Bar AC is like the JSA call fused with Winlink.

Okay.

So the reason why I built Emcom Tools was when I first got into digital mode communication around 2020, I had a very deep engineering background and technical background, and I had a hard time making my first HF mercury or HF RDoP connection over Winlink.

And you have the settings on your computer, how you interface your computer to your transceiver, you have the operating settings for audio, you have to figure out the cat control settings, and then you have to figure out the application.

And then if you have multiple applications, for example, like Winlink or JS8 or FT8 or Direwolf, Each one has these very specific nuances.

And it just felt like for someone who just wanted to send out an APRS message or send out a Winlink email over HF or VHF, it was just a lot of unnecessary and complicated things.

So I decided that what I wanted to do was figure that out for everybody.

So there is a three-step process to MCOM tools.

You...

Wyson has provided safety communications for this event since at least 1985, possibly earlier.

Over the decades, WISEN communications for the event have evolved, passing canoe numbers from checkpoint to checkpoint by voice, through packet radio, APRS tracking, DMR, Winlink and more.

This year, we're adding POC radios to the mix, that's Push to Talk over Cellular, to see how well they cope with the RF voodoo land that surrounds the Hawkesbury River.

Fundraising apart, the event is a great opportunity for Wysen members to hone their skills operating off-grid under challenging conditions for up to 24 hours.

In contrast, the Philippine Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, PARADEN, or Delta X-Ray 1 Papa Romeo Delta, uses 2 metres and 70 centimetres for most of its network, which also has an active status dashboard, something which I have yet to discover anywhere in Australia.

Within the various emergency systems across the globe, two proprietary tools seem to have taken hold, Winlink and Vara, the first providing a mechanism for message exchange with an associated global network of receivers, the latter a way of transmitting it across radio.

Together, they claim to provide the basics of a parallel internet for, quote, when the internet goes down, mobile phone networks fail or natural disasters isolate communities, end quote.

Frankly, bandwidth considerations alone will reveal that it's the same kind of absurd claim that the ARRL made famous, when all else fails.

The tools, Winlink and Vara, are claimed to be cross-platform, but all links supplied by Wysonsites, I found, are for Windows only, closed source or worse, stuck behind a user account login.

There are efforts underway for open source replacements for both Vara and Winlink.

According to GitHub, both replacement projects started in 2023.

But this software is in active development, and I see little evidence of wide adoption of either at this stage.

But local radios absolutely can get involved and do this.

So they've paired up with amateurs who are using things like Winlink and things to, uh, get messages through.

Absolutely, when all else fails, amateur radio.

I wonder if the station knew about amateur radio when they thought, "Do you know what? Hey, we need to do something about this.

tinkering around with that for a little bit.

And also Bleepat Winlink is a Debian version of Winlink and not just a Raspberry Pi.

I'll have to do some research on that too, but I'm going to do some Winlink.

I'm going to do some APRS.

I'm going to do some programming.