What is the best gateway to connect to?
A new prediction score in Radio Mail 2.0
helps you
answer that.
[whistling music]
Now, by default,
when you start a session and you
select the gateway,
it will open up the best path prediction
window,
and you see all the remote station
that you can connect
to
ranked by score based on the prediction of
your
ability to connect to them.
So you can scroll around
and select the one you're
interested. You can also filter down
that list.
So you can open the filter, change the
mode, change the band,
and basically narrow
down the list based on your current
capabilities.
Maybe you don't have a particular antenna
that day, and you don't want to
see any station on that band.
Once you change those parameter,
the list will, uh,
recompute and resort automatically.
All of that is done locally on your
device.
And there are a couple of assumption built
in, uh, in term of radio
power and the noise floor
that you have around you, and you
can change those at the top. So
if you say increase
your power of your station,
now you'll see the score going
up. So obviously,
green means you're more likely to connect,
uh, and as you go down the list, um,
you're less likely to be able to
establish a connection. Uh, also note
that the, uh,
station that are NVIS
are identified as such, so
that you can also
deploy your antenna in a way
that will give you the most, um,
likely-likelihood to reach those station.
Um, with HF,
propagation depends on the time of the
day,
so you can actually change the time, uh,
in the
future over twenty-four hours to actually
see how
the propagation change over time
and perhaps
determine a better window for you to be
able to
connect to a particular station. Um,
so that
changes, uh, quite a lot.
So it's actually pretty fun to play with
it and sort of see
when your communication window should
occur to be able to reach some particular
station.
Now, let's take a look at VHF/UHF station.
Let's switch to packet. And for this mode,
in this
case, the only factor
is the distance of the station to your
location.
So the prediction use the location known
of your
device as well as the station
and will rank them
accordingly based on your ability to, um,
reach it.
Now, in addition to that,
both model also incorporate
successful or failed attempt to connect to
station
to influence the score.
So every session when it's completed,
the information is
aggregated anonymously and
is being used to
actually weigh, um, the station based on,
on
those, uh, recent report. And
if you look here, the fourth
station here, WH6AZ-10, even though it's
very close, it's one mile,
it's in my lab here, it has a low score
because it's the station I use constantly
to test,
and therefore, there
are a lot of failures, um,
that occur with that
station. And therefore,
the success rate is determined to be lower
because there's been a lot of failed
connection that have been reported against
that particular station.
In addition to the best path prediction,
Radio Mail
still has the notion of favorite,
like the previous version of Radio
Mail.
So you can navigate to your favorite,
and any station that you use frequently
will be found here, and you
can, uh, filter them by mode and band,
so you
can easily find them
and do a quick connect. Um, you...
This can be both station that
are coming from the Winlink
directory,
but also custom station you may have added
will re-
be reflected here. So
to favorite your station,
you go into the dir-directory itself,
and you will see all the station with a
star are favorite.
You can filter them. The filter here
is similar to what you find in best path
prediction. Actually, the settings will,
uh, carry over,
except here you have a few more, um,
filter you can toggle.
You can, um, filter by origin
if it's a published station from
Winlink or if it's something custom you've
added, and you can
toggle those to navigate your directory.
So let's re-add the HF, uh,
mode here so we can have all the
station available.
And in the dir-directory, the
station will, um,
be combined with all the channel
available,
like in the previous version of, uh,
Radio Mail.
So if you select a particular station,
let's say
H six, uh, H seven L here, you see a,
a map
with the location and all the channel
are basically the
band, the frequency, the mode
that this station exposes.
So you can see everything at one glance.
Uh, you can favorite if you want it,
and you can get a sense of the
capabilities of what is, um, nearby you.
You can also quickly search the directory.
If you know a station
or you wanna look at certain call sign,
you just tap it and it will filter the
list down to,
uh, your entries here.
And once you've found the station,
if it's the
one you had in mind,
you can look at its location, look at the
channel, add it to favorite, and do
that very quickly.
If you want to add a custom station,
you go into your favorite.
You can look at the custom station there.
Uh, and if you, um,
create a custom station and you actually
enter a
grid square for it,
it will also show it on the map,
and it will get
included in the best path prediction
because now the application
knows where this custom station
is located.
When you enter a custom station,
you can name it.
You can create an alias.
And like previous version of Radio
Mail,
you can also set up a connection script.
If it's a packet station,
you can turn it on and then
describe what command to execute.
If you connect to a node
and want to establish connection, you can
do it so here.
With the best path prediction feature in
Radio Mail 2.0, you can now start
with the station that's most likely to
answer.
Mahalo and 73.