#TH-D74 #APRS #Winlink

Winlink Via APRS

There’s that thing where you have a piece of gear that you know does something cool but then you never use it. Until you do.

APRS Scope-Creep

With my iGate up and running and actually doing things with stuff, I was just idly looking at my Kenwood TH-D74A and thinking about how I could use it to send Winlink messages. I have done very little thinking about that other than when I’ve seen others check in to nets using APRS. The TH-D74 has a built-in TNC and I’ve been happily sending test messages. Why not send a quick email?

How I Did It

A large part of this blog is me writing stuff down so that I can remember how to do it later. This is that part of the post.

  1. The recipient of the messages is WLNK-1.
  2. The first message is: SP email@domain.tld Subect Text Goes Here
  3. Get an ack from WLNK-1 that has three numbers in it like: 287.
  4. 287 means “Send the second, eighth, and seventh characters of your Winlink email password jumbled with 3 other characters.”
  5. Get another ack that says you’ve got about 2 hours before you have to authenticate again.
  6. Send your message: Here is my msg. I can go on and on for a bit.
  7. End your message: /EX
  8. ~Fin~

Resources

I didn’t invent this. I distilled it from other sites:

https://ki4hdu.com/amateur-radio/misc/winlink-aprslink/

https://winlink.org/APRSLink

There are others. I also used the TH-D74 manual (YES! YES I DID!)

Notes For Me

Select an ack from the Winlink server. Hit the MSG key (4) to start a new message to the server.

Don’t authenticate your phone with the APRS.FI app while you’re trying to do stuff over RF. Duh. But…I proved it was a bad idea.

Wait for an ack. Getting things out of order will be a total pain.

Final

Now that I know there’s APRS traffic around me, I’m having a great time messing with it. When I’ve carried my TH-D74 around beaconing and listening long enough, I’ll report back. So far? Lots of fun!

NOTE

Thanks to Joe KB8AP for pointing out that my RSS feed was kinda screwed up. I think I was running a jekyll server session in one window while deploying in another and the directory got clobbered with a bunch of localhost nonsense. I’m not trying to H@XX0R your Gibson. I can’t undo it once it hits a reader, so we’ll just have to be cool and let it age out. I’m pretty sure that’s what’ll happen. Sorry ‘bout that!

73 and thanks for reading!