After a while of being dormant i reactivated my winlink account and I am in the process of setting up
email over ICOM710 and
Pactor II(514k).
M710, AT-130 and
Pactor II worked on my old
boat. now i am setting it up on my
current boat. It has dynaplate and AT130 appears to be well grounded to it, and so is
ICOM M710.
I made new DIM8
cables and I can confirm connectivity to Pactor from windows 7 PC on the boat.
In command line mode i get FW revision and i can run
modem commands. I am at FW 3.6. and winlink express bitches as it wants FW 4.0 or later. So i resorted to airmail.
I installed airmail3.4 and i am able to control the
modem and subsequently M710
radio. i bought this
radio new and i was using it for ham frequencies on my prior boat so it was setup correctly.
I am having hard time connecting to stations. I am using the propagation table to see which stations have highest likelihood of connection. (green). It doesn't look like I get a clear audio to discern if station is busy or no. 10 years ago i remember that on my old boat i was getting a clearer chirp when station is busy, and i could tell not to bother trying to connect which it sounded like it has pactor traffic.
I remember that i would wait for a what was the ending of Pactor
transmission and was often successful in jumping on new channel as soon as pactor
transmission ends.
Ive tried about a dozen times over the last two days and i keep getting station occupied.
I don't have
internet on the boat and
cell phone has no connectivity either so i cant double check the settings via telnet .
i know that at home on a PC I was able to install airmail 3.4 and setup winlink so that I can telnet and get emails. i got one grib file request
email to
work so i know my password is setup correctly.
On the boat i am pretty sure i am using the same settings on Airmail.
Should I be looking into grounding and trying to ensure signal bounce is good or keep trying new stations?
Any other tips on how to proceed next?
Are winlink stations that much more occupied as opposed to 10 years ago?