ZS1RS Cape Towns Winlink Gateway

Submitted by ZS1RS on Sat, 2014-10-04 18:47

The ZS1RS Winlink RMS Hybrid Server, situated in Cape Town, South Africa, is one of the most southern RMS stations on the Winlink network. The station has excellent coverage of the South African coastline from Mauritius to St Helena and usable coverage from the top of Madagascar and along the eastern coast of South America
Both the Winmor 500/1600 and Pactor 1-4 modes are supported on all frequencies

The station runs off an old Dell laptop powered from a dell 12volt vehicle charger. (the batteries are long time dead and the 12 charger can happily run from the station 12v system)
The radio is a Kenwood TS480 set to 80w and currently feeds a coaxial trap dipole for 40m and 20m, as well as a 5 element tri band beam on 20m which is currently pointing NNE

The whole station runs off a 30amp power supply from the mains 24/7.
In case of temporary power outage, there is a 200Ah battery bank to keep everything operational .

The station has been a work in progress, and with the assistance of data gathered from the use of RMS Analyzer. Various interference problems have been rectified and better utilization of frequencies scanned has been achieved.

With the data from RMS Trimode gathered and displayed by RMS Analyzer over the year ZS1RS has been in operation , I have made a coverage map based on actual MM user connections from all bands and modes, with some of the longer distances being achieved by a Winmor user. The coverage map is a fairly good indication of what can be achieved from a modest installation on a sailing yacht, or RV. All the connections I confirmed were from stations using their larger home antennas have been left out intentionally.

Image: 
Winlink Linkomatic