Articles
Getting the local and global Weather, News, and your contacts without using the internet
Hello operators. I hope you're having a great day. As I'm having a cup of chocolate in the QTH and contemplating T3 storms disrupting today's portable operations, I opened up Winlink. I started calling my local VHF Winlink RMS here in Switzerland to get the email and other important information.
I then realized today was a great day to talk a little about how to keep up to date with the Weather, get News, and have the possibility of posting your position and sending emails to contacts or, even if needed, your local authorities.
Now that we're in 2022, most people have come to depend on their smartphones entirely and, of course, their internet connection for entertainment and contacting others. And, to be fair, as internet access spreads globally in the next few years, most people will never be in a situation where they won't have good connectivity for more than a few hours.
There will always be places or situations where internet connectivity will fail. If you are an amateur radio operator or belong to the prepping community, or are just a person that likes to have a plan B (or C and even D), then this post is definitely for you.
Today I want to talk to you about combining Winlink (https://winlink.org) and Saildocs to give you the possibility of accessing vital information in situations where internet connectivity might not be present or heavily impaired.
Winlink is a "network of amateur radio and authorized government stations that provide worldwide radio email using radio pathways where the internet is nonexistent.
Saildocs is "an email-based document-retrieval system for the delivery of text-based Internet documents either on request or by subscription."
By combining both services, you can retrieve web pages by sending specifically formatted emails to the SailDocs service through Winlink that don't need an internet connection to be sent and received.
The way that this works is by:
- Send an email to the recipient called "INQUIRY" (without quotes).
- Use "REQUEST" (without quotes) as a Subject.
- Use the keywords on the Winlink Catalog Request to retrieve either the Weather (from NOAA), News (from the BBC or a couple of other outlets), or, even better, write directly the website you want the SailDocs service to retrieve for you in text-only format.
Let me give you an example of what I send daily to get the most relevant information (to me) as part of my communications plan.
To: INQUIRY
Subject: REQUEST
Body:
ABNT20.KNHC
BBCTOP
FZNT26.KNHC
PROP_3DAY
PROP_RSGA
PROP_WWV
WL2K_NEARBY
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
https://www.reuters.com/news/archive/worldNews?date=today
This single email gets me 12 individual email responses from SailDocs with the following information:
- ABNT20.KNHC: Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami
- FZNT26.KNHC: National Weather Service Marine Forecast
- PROP_3DAY: 3-day Space Weather Predictions from NOAA
- PROP_RSGA: Solar and Geophysical Activity Summary from NOAA
- PROP_WWV: Geophysical Alert Message from NOAA
- WL2K_NEARBY: List of nearby stations that have sent Winlink Position Reports to the Winlink System
- BBCTOP: Top Daily Global News from the BBC. Just a title and a concise description.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random: The Special:Random page is a link that will automatically (and randomly) take you to any article on Wikipedia. This one is just for a little bit of fun.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events: A list of current global events, also from Wikipedia
- https://www.reuters.com/news/archive/worldNews?date=today: Today's most important News, from Reuters
- https://lite.poandpo.com/: Breaking world news, latest headlines, and stories from POST Online Media.
- https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng: English version of SwissInfo, a Switzerland News Portal.
Typically, using VARA FM, this email request takes about 10 to 20 seconds to be sent, while the responses take about 10 to 12 minutes.
Why is this important for you?
Let's say you're in a situation where internet connectivity is lost due to a blackout, solar storm, hurricane, or something far simpler (a significant technical error). Or you're in the middle of the ocean or a very remote location with a significantly impaired or inexistent internet connection. This method will allow you to know the local, regional, or even global situation with minimal power requirements from your VHF/UHF or HF radio.
Additionally, access to this information will significantly help your local group since you can rebroadcast this information using FM voice or HF voice.
One important caveat is that, in the case you are in the middle of a local or regional emergency, you should NOT be taking much time in your local RMS. You should not even be transmitting on amateur radio frequencies if not necessary since you might be occupying resources that might be better devoted to serving the immediate potential loss of life and property of your community.
Hopefully, this post has been of service to you. If that's the case, please let us know by email at go@aro.travel or if you prefer Winlink to HB9HJU@winlink.org. If you're watching the video version of this post, don't hesitate to use the comment feature on YouTube. We'd love to hear from you.
If you have finished this article, we'd love to invite you to our Amateur Radio Outdoors JS8/WNLK Weekly Net. Please Send an email to AROWNLKNET@WINLINK.ORG for instructions and more information.
73 de Luis, HB9HJU
Amateur Radio Outdoors