Relay Stations greatly extend the reach and capabilities of the WDN Net. They are essentially the life blood of any traffic net. Forwarding takes that even further.
In addition to keyboard-to-keyboard real-time relay of information, our participating stations can also forward traffic into the Winlink System, and via email, where available, to reach the intended person.
WINLINK FORWARDING
Your check-in should look like:
NCS < MYCALL MyName 1 QTC > WL2K
Please make sure your message contains either the callsign of a registered WL2K user, our an email address for the intended recipient(s). We will forward your traffic as-is into the system.
EMAIL FORWARDING
Your check-in should look like:
NCS < MYCALL MyName 1 QTC > theirname@domain.com
example:
NCS < KB6HOH Steve 1 QTC > k7ky@ferrycreek.org
Any receiving station that has an internet connection can forward your traffic to an email recipient so long as the email address is provided in the message.
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A NOTE TO RF-ONLY “PURISTS”
Though some ops prefer RF-only delivery of traffic, the WDN philosophy is to use the fastest mode *currently available* to get the message through.
If you are in a region that has no internet infrastructure, the WDN is a great way to make that first hop to a region that does. In any regional or large-scale emergency situation, there may still be areas that have internet and/or cell phone access. Refusing to leverage these could cost lives in an emergency. Just because we can use off-road vehicles and dirt roads doesn’t mean we would pass up a stretch of freeway or paved road that’s still intact! Likewise, any good communications network will leverage any link that is still in place.
So if a maritime mobile station in the Pacific wants to get a message through to someone in New York, the WDN could be the ‘first hop’ on HF to one of our ops in a western state. That WDN station isn’t going to avoid using the internet to send it the rest of the way…
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