Fun with HF email

I have been playing with my SSB lately and got Airmail connected over HF to various stations in the Winlink network. This doesn’t have an incredibly useful benefit right now while we are sitting in the states with ubiquitous wifi but when we head off again it will.

The obvious benefit is to keep in touch with family and friends back home. The second benefit is the locator service provided by Winlink. You may notice the new link on the links menu, this links to our location as last updated. As you can imagine it won’t move around much while we are sitting in St Augustine, probably won’t get updated often either. At some point I’ll make my own that posts directly to our website.

Airmail is windows software, blah, but it works very well under Wine. I have it running on the boat computer and displaying on my laptop via X over SSH. There is software that supports Winlink on linux but it is a steep learning curve. I’ll get to it next.

Here is a table of stations I have connected to, 200nm is enough to get us across the Atlantic. I should be able to connect in the 6000nm – 10000nm range but I think I need to add standoffs to the antenna wire going up the backstay.