Aloha and welcome. I'm WH6AZ, here to give you high signal insight about radio mail, the WinLink iPhone application I created. In a previous video, I showed you how you can create a VARA FM hotspot to send and receive email in the field. And while this is great for when you're off-grid, you're still limited by the WinLink gateways that are in the range of VHF direct line of sight. This may not always be the case, for example, in a major weather event, when the power is down, and local infrastructure is out of commission. So today we're going to take a look at how you can create a VARA HF hotspot so you can increase your operational reach and truly send and receive email from anywhere. Stay with me, and I will walk you through every step of the way. So today I'm going to see if I can optimize my operational efficiency and only use the minimal amount of gear I need to connect. So let's see what I have. I have my trusty building T4 computer here. Battery. I've got a 40 meter N-fed antenna. And of course, my trusty IC-705. I'm going to go ahead and follow this new trilio by, and I'll be right back. Okay, so now I have my antenna connected, and I also connected the computer and turn it on, and let's turn on the radio. And now I'm going to go and make sure I can connect to the hotspot that's running on the computer itself. I put my phone in there, I can note just to make sure that we don't have any other connection interfering. So I'm connecting to the computer itself here, and I'm going to go ahead and launch radio well. And let's see if we can discover the radio that we configured under HF. And there is, it's shown IC-705 HF. And then select that. Let's check the audio input, yep, it's connecting fine. And now let's see if we can make connection. So I'm going to look for a station on a different island here. So let's see if we can connect to this station here. I think it's on the big island, the Bluetooth 6, JDC. So you can see that I need to care of cat control for me, actually change the frequency automatically. I'm going to make sure the band is correct also, with the BED in the mode of the band. This is looking pretty good on the Bson 10i, it's a tuned antenna. There you go. [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] Looks like I have a message, doing it. But we're only running 5 watt here with the E-britin battery of the IC-705. And our HF can be a bit slower time. That's so far so good. [silence] There you go. That took a little bit of a while, but the email went through. And we achieved that with the radio, a little billing computer, radio mail, and a wire in a tree. We started a station about 300 miles away from us. Now that we're back in the shack, let's take a look at what's inside this computer. In the previous video, I went into great detail about what's required to create the VRIFM hotspot, talking about Varoni, the various configuration, all the gear involved. I'm not going to repeat this information here, you should just go and watch the video up here and get all the background information you need. Today we're going to be focusing on running Varoni, HF, on Linux computer. So let's jump in. This first assumes that you have installed Varoni, which requires the wine emulator. Although it's not an emulator, but that's for another day. And now plenty of instructional mind video explains how to do that. I will link that into the description, but we're not going to spend time doing that today. Let's jump in. First, you're going to need to download Varoni, and for that you go to pithub. com, islandmagic, Varoni, and then on the right hand side you will find the link to the releases. So you can just go in that section and look for the architecture that match your computer. In my case, I'm running Linux on a AMD 64 processor. So I will download that zip file and you just expand it somewhere you comfortable. I just did that earlier, so now I can go ahead to the terminal and find my installation. So in the directory you're going to have two main files, the Varoni itself, executable, as well as the sample configuration that you send. So let's take a look. I have configured mine to run on Varoni FM previously, and we're going to expand that so you can run Varoni HF. So I'm just going to go ahead and copy this section here and paste it down here . So what's particular about Varoni HF and also overall running on Linux is that for CAD control, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to access the COM port from within Varon. Varoni FM has native support for CAD control, so you can control some radio, the application, but for Varoni HF you pretty much have to rely on an external CAD control system, and on the Linux that's something that I use permanently to control all the radio. So let's see how that works. So here I'm going to change the name of my device. I want to call that IC75HF type. I'm going to specify that to be HF, and this runs the vine emulator, the wine emulator I should say, and then I just need to change the path. So by default, Varoni is in store in the Varoni directory, and then since I only have one radio, I really don't need to swap the configuration for Varoni. So I'm going to remove that line, it will just use the default, and then I also like to run it on a different port. And then the CAD control section here, that's where you're going to specify read control and the various parameters that you need. So by default, this is the port it's running on, 4532, and it's invoking the read control daemon, so it's going to run in the background and be accessible via TCP/IP. And here are the parameters that are needed for my radio. So let's take a look at how you configure those parameters, because this is often a source of problem, and I know myself I've struggled with that a lot, always forget what you put here, and as a result, it's a big big source of failure. So to take a look at the Hamlib parameters, let's just go to the Hamlib page on GitHub, and then it has a page here that lists all the radio that are supported, and which version of read control supports this radio. So I'm going to scroll down and maybe actually just search it here for my C705. And sure enough, I get the model here, 3085. So I had the correct model number here, and then this describes the COM port that the radio shows us at, and then the speed that we want to use. So this looks pretty good, but let's test it out before we actually save this. Let's run a test of read control to make sure we have all the parameter correct . So 3085, my device here, I see 75A, and the speed. Okay, so now it prompts me for command, so I can get frequency, and it returns the frequency, so I know that this is actually talking to my radio properly, so that's a good step to validate. In some cases, depending on your configuration, read control may not be able to connect to the USB port to COM port. And there is a small trick you have to do on Linux to make that work. You basically have to add your user to the dial out group, so that it's allowed to actually access the COM port. So in order to do that, you type this command and add yourself to the dial out group, and then this will add the currently logged in user to that group. And then if you want to verify that it's set up properly, you can just type group dial out, and then it should show you here all the user that are defined under a system that has access to the dial out property. So that looks correct in this case. Okay, so now I've updated the configuration, and let's stop Varani, and let's run a test to see if everything's stopped properly. Switch over to another terminal here from another computer, and I'm going to simulate what radio mail does when it interacts with Varani. So it's connecting the TCP/IP, and it's basically issuing various commands. So first we're going to simulate how radio mail connects itself. So it's using Telnet, and I'm going to tell Net to the... I was using not really Telnet, but it's connecting a TCP connection. And I'm going to connect to the port that Varani itself listens to. And when I'm here, I can list my device, and I see the two devices I've defined , and I'm going to go ahead and start the HF-705. So now it's starting Varani on the Linux machine, and it should also have started the Recontrol demon in the background. So let's see if that also works. So in the second terminal here, I'm going to connect to the demon for 532. That's the default port for Recontrol. Okay. Seems happy here. All right. And I'm going to see if I can get frequency. That's working. Let's see if I can get PTT. Yep. And then the last thing, radio mail users is also the mode, so we can set it up . Okay. So all of this looks good. Basically Varani started Vara program, started the Recontrol demon listening. I'm able to issue all the command. Everything looks good here. I'm going to terminate the session here. So let's head over to radio mail and go into settings and see if we can find all device. So Var-HF modem, and here shows you a list of what's been discovered, the IC- 705HF that we just defined earlier. So I'm going to collect that. And then I can check the audio input monitor to make sure that your audio level is set correctly. So if you're enough, we see the audio coming in here. So that looks good. And now I'm going to see if I can establish connection. Before I do that, let's switch over to camera here so we can get a view of the radio itself. And I'm going to look for a station nearby and see if we can connect. So Vara is now launched on the computer. So if you notice on the radio, radio mail to control, that can't control it, change the frequency, make sure the mode was correct. Okay, no session is finished here. All right, so what's interesting now is I have both configuration for the same radio on Varini. So what I can do is I can just swap the antenna real quick here and we'll see if we can establish a Var-HFM connection using the same setup. So now that I've swapped the antenna, let's take a look at all configuration here, Var-HFM. I see the IC705FN, so that looks good. And I can just go here and find another station here nearby and see if I can do a Var-HFM connection and notice the dial frequency and mode switch automatically when I make the connection here. So now Var-HFM started establishing a session and goes a lot faster than HF. And there you go. And then at the end of the session, it will restore the frequency and the mode on the radio that was used previously. I hope this video inspired you to build your own Var-HF hotspot using Varini and radio mail so you can go outside and get on the air. Until next time, 73 and Aloha.