So what are people really complaining about with Winlink/Winmor?
Automatic operation that in many cases just fires up on top of people in ongoing QSOs. Locally it was misconfigured telpac (packet) gateways on 2m that were destroying an established packet network...took months to get the ops to move them.
People obscuring business/commercial email traffic because basically nobody can actually monitor the traffic...goes against ham radio principles for use of spectrum.
The ability for people to attach "Hi How are you.doc" MS Word files or pdf files when the same single sentence in plain ascii text would be a fraction of a percent of the file size to send. This is a very real problem with 1200b rate packet networks for message handling.
Closed source software and protocols - Leaves the supposed 'emergency' communications efforts at the mercy of the authors.
Example: if they put a backdoor in the software (no way to tell because it is closed source) they could remotely shut down all users of Winlink at will.
The authors have an obvious business affiliation with, until Winmor, the sole source hardware manufacturer of the Pactor III modem that Winlink requires. So it's a business monopoly for $1500 modems (ludicrously over priced excluding many amateurs from even participating or having access to the system). Modems that are manufactured by a business interest of a foreign government (SCS German company).
Layer politics on it...what if we were at war with Germany...a foreign interest would have full control on what is supposed to be an emergency/disaster last resort method of communications.
The concept is sound, it's all the details that are all wrong.
