Hmmm, I didn’t think of that. That approach actually solves something similar I was thinking about. I like to set-up an receive only I-gate at my home and self-spot that way. The RPR has two issues, 1) I’d need another expensive TNC at home and 2) for 30m my house is in the skip zone for my main region of SOTA activations. I’d rather use 80m. Your idea solves it. Hmmmm.
HF APRS coverage is not good in Continental Europe, whereas Winlink coverage is - hence the reason I started looking at this mode. At the moment I’m looking at email to SMS gateways, so that a Winlink email could travel RF to the next station and then from there via the Internet to one of these gateways and then on to one of the existing SMS gateways into SOTAWatch. It would be very simple if EE in the UK had such a gateway (one hop less) but from what I can find out they do not, so it has to be a separate global supplier, which could get rejected at the gateway. I have still to check whether one of my cell phone providers gateways here in Germany allows me to send the SMS outside of their network, when it comes in via email.
Ed.
FYI Robust packet is also supported by Winlink, if you have a TNC that supports it. Winlink already has CRC checking, so it’s fairly robust in any case.