Warning––Winmor evangelist posting!
I am a very active beta tester of Winmor (someone recently coined the term "winmoron"
). It represents a huge leap forward for the Winlink network and my only concern is will the Winlink network, which only has a finite number of "radio mail server" stations, survive the influx of new users?
First the bad:
Like most digital mode software it is a little obscure to use. It's user interface is clunky, strange and does not meet most normal Windows user interface guidelines. This can be forgiven in the beta period as the focus is on getting the modem to work, however.
Now the good:
The sound card TNC modem works great.
With a properly adjusted transceiver drive level and an S9, low multipath connection you can see burst rates in excess of 5Kbytes/min.
Because of ARQ overhead and connection negotiation overhead you don't see good payload rates until the message size goes over about 1K at which point it starts to become really impressive. For 1-5K payloads 1Kbyte/min is typical. For 5-10K payloads 2Kbyte/min is typical.
Bandwidth is only 1.6KHz instead of the 2.5KHz of Pactor 3 and speed scales at about 60% of Pactor 3 (about the same as Pactor 2).
The protocol is very tolerant of simple sound card interface set-ups. The developers test with the Signalink using VOX and that's what I and many other testers use. ARQ with VOX––that's awesome!
The protocol is tolerant of varying conditions and will change up/down speed rates and bandwidths automatically to keep the ARQ repeat rate down. Under what I would characterize as "fair to poor" NVIS (high multipath) conditions you can still move a 1-5K payload at 200bytes/min typical.
Do not be fooled into a direct comparison to other keyboard to keyboard modes. There is no such mode in Winmor. It only moves email (and attachments!) Sure, you can get Olivia to hook up in really crappy conditions but you can't really move email with it and not bit perfect email, either. Nor is there the promise of an existing network of stations to move the mail to/from the internet for you. The price you pay is you need at least average band conditions.
This will be an invaluable resource once it is completed. Imagine being able to get short emails to/from family and friends outside of a disaster area you might be stuck in.
Did I mention it's free? Pactor 3 modems are in the $1K range.
Right now all beta testing is peer to peer. No Winlink RMS stations are running it yet. We are probably a year away from that, maybe less. We need more beta testers. Go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WINMOR/ to sign up on the group, download Winmor and get going!