P2P VARA HF with iPad

Aloha and welcome! I'm WH6AZ here to bring you high signal insights about radio mail, the win link iPhone application I created. Today I'm going to show you how you can contact a P2P VARRA HF station. We're going to participate in a live EMCOM direct messaging event that's taking place right now. First let's take a look at my setup. I'm using an iPad Pro with a smart keyboard folio running radio mail. I also have an IC705 connected to a B-Link T 4 computer that's running as a headless, computer it's running Windows, VARRA as well as the new VARRA-Nee agent that coordinates everything and if you want to know how you create your own headless setup, look at the previous video where I walk you through how to create your own VAR RA hotspot. I'm also using the PA500 amplifier and everything is powered by a biano battery as well as the body power mini as the power distribution. I'm going to use radio mail on an iPad. Even though radio mail has not been designed for iPad, it will run fine as an iOS app. The iPad paired with a keyboard like the smart keyboard folio makes a very compact setup particularly when you're using forms. First we need to create an entry for the station we're going to contact. Let's take a look. You head over into station directory and then I'm tapping add station and then we need to specify the call sign of the P2P station we're going to target. In our case we 're going to target age 6T. Then we pick the mode, we want VARRA-HF and then we have to enter the frequency . The station was listed as center frequency 71 19.5 but we need to enter the dial frequency in radio mail. So you have to subtract 1500. So in our case there would be 71 18 and then we have to specify the bandwidth. For P2P station here it's going to operate on 500 hertz so we need to specify 500 hertz. That's important because this tells the VARRA-HF how much bandwidth is going to use. Press done and now our station is set up. Let's head over to the forms and look for the win link check-in message. There it is. I'm going to send it to EDM. This we address the message to EDM hoping that basically it's going to be relayed to that station. Then I'm going to enter my contact name, my call sign. Then we see an exercise location. You notice here on the latitude and longitude it's already prefilled by radio mail. It's using the internal GPS of the device and then we 'll specify it automatically and also calculate my grid square. So that looks pretty good and then in the comment here I'm going to put EDM P2P exercise. Okay so I think I got everything in there. So I'm just going to press done and then let's change the title of the subject of the of the message here. I'm going to call this EMCOM direct messaging exercise. All right that looks good. So now before we send the message into the outbox we need to do a couple of things because we're going to do a P2P connection and that means we need to address it to the station. We want to connect to P2P. So we're going to change the two recipients here. We're going to add AH6T and then also I need to tell radio mail we want to only deliver to P2P or station so that if we ever connect to a win-link CMS it's not going to deliver this message but only when I connect to AH6T. So that looks okay. So now I can just place that in my outbox and then I'm going to go and head over here and make a connection. Before I do that let's switch over to my other screen so we can actually see what's going to happen behind the scene. So by setup here again I have my IC705. I've got my billing T4 computer in the back here that's running the VARAMADAM as well as the VARANI launcher and then everything is powered by the BIONO battery. So we're completely off-grid for this exercise. So now I can go into my favorite and look for the VARI-HF and I need to configure the device. So I'm going here and going to look for VARI-HF modem that's being advertised by VARANI. So here it is and now I can just go back and I should be able to pick up the station. There it is, AH6T and let's make a connection. Regu you see VARRA has launched in the Windows computer as well as a big control so that Redium-N can change the frequency and control the PTT and here's VARRA establishing a connection with the remote station negotiating speed. [silence] Let's try to go faster, maybe 8 bit per second. [silence] Only 1 bit per second. [silence] Hopefully it's going to ramp up the speed here a little bit. There we go 61 bit per second again. That's a good time to grab some coffee and see what's going on. [silence] Let's add 88 bit per second. [silence] The message is 1800 bytes in total compressed. All right it's ramping up 177 bit per second. Pretty happy with that. Nope that was a bit too fast, let's go back down. Sometimes you'll hear VARRA kind of renegotiate in the middle of the transmission. I think that's what's going on right now. It's going and starting back down at the lowest rate. Now it's going up a bit. [silence] Let me go back at 88, about halfway. [silence] And there you go. All message is done. I hope you learned something today about how to send peer-to-peer messages with VARRA HF station using radio mail and that will inspire you to dig more on how you can use radio mail for your portable operation. Until next time 73 and Aloha.