First Winlink Email Sent Over MERCURY on RF! (Demo)

KM6LYW Radio

The guys at Rhizomatica just made a better VARA than VARA. Unlike VARA, it’s free, open-source, runs on Linux and Raspberry Pi. While not directly compatible with the proprietary VARA encoding, it does use the same API so existing VARA-HF clients (Pat, Winlink Express) can immediately leverage this exiting new HF radio transport!

In this video, we use “Pat” (http://getpat.io) Winlink email client on “DigiPi” (http://digipi.org) and Mercury (https://github.com/Rhizomatica/mercury) to send an email message over RF from one Raspberry Pi to the other.

The radio on the right (ic705) is the client running pat client (pat http), and the radio on the left (ic7300) is running pat server (pat –listen=vara http).

This is a first-ever technology demonstration and proof-of-life. Much more is to come, in fact, I think I’ll create a MERCURY Winlink Server that everyone can run along side VARA, Packet, ARDOP, etc.

Both VARA and MERCURY leverage “Orthoganal Frequency Division Multiplexing” which is the foundation for modern/commercial RF transports, including WIFI. That’s how we get our speed and reliability. MERCURY includes “gear shifting” dynamically adapting to conditions and fading SNR.

Project MERCURY https://github.com/Rhizomatica/mercury

DigiPi https://digipi.org/