Winlink email on MacOS

To get Winlink Email working (both send and receive emails) on MacOS intel with MacOS Sonoma 14.7.2 and a MacBook Air 2018 using a USB sound card dongle here is what I did.

Use at your own risk. I make no promises this will work for you.

Set Up a Winlink Email Account

First of course create a Winlink email account here

https://www.winlink.org/

Install Mac Ports and WINE

I then installed Mac Ports.

https://www.macports.org/

In the MacOS Terminal app I then did as follows:

Installed Wine (wine-stable) using Mac Ports. 

sudo port install wine-stable

Install VARA HF

Then I used Wine to install "VARA setup (run as Administrator).exe"

wine “VARA setup (run as Administrator).exe”

Then I had to copy over a bunch of DLLs from my Windows 10 machine that were in the Windows/syswow64 directory into the .wine/drive_c/windows/syswow64 directory on the Mac

Specifically: 

MSCHRT20.OCX

MSCOMCTL.OCX

MSCOMM32.OCX

msvbvm60.dll

MSWINSCK.OCX

Install Winlink Pat

I installed Winlink Pat from here

https://getpat.io/

Running Winlink Pat and VARA HF

Then to get it all running in the terminal I ran VARA HF first by running wine VARA.exe from the directory it was installed in .wine/drive_c/VARA and set it up as usual. 

wine VARA.exe

Then in another terminal I ran pat http and set up Pat for winlink.

pat http

This allows you to access Pat for Winlink using your web browser as a GUI  

To connect to VARA HF then under the hamburger menu in Pat I selected Action, Connect, and left (select alias) as is, and then selected transport as VARA HF. 

Under the show RMS List it shows the available RMS stations and I selected the nearest one and then Connect and it instantly started the connect sequence. 

I make no promises this will work for anyone else but  it might be some help if you have an intel Mac. It works for me for both sending and receiving emails as of January 5, 2025.

Winlink Express on MacOS

As of January 8, 2025 I now have Winlink Express installed on my Intel MacBook Air 2018 using Wine and it appears to work and I have sent and received a test email via the setup.

In the MacOS terminal just run

wine Winlink_Express_install.exe

It connects via Telnet fine and brings up VARA HF fine. There is a bit of a lag when Winlink opens VARA HF. The program seems to minimize to the MacOS dock and I click it to bring it back up and then there's a bit of a delay until the window fully renders. It might be a second if that. But then it all seems to come to life and audio shows up on the waterfall, etc. Otherwise it works the same as under native Windows 10.

I've also made little automations using the MacOS automator so I can click on VARA HF and/or Winlink Express and launch them without using the terminal. 

Here are the scripts when making a New Document, Application, and using Run Shell Script /bin/zsh

For Winlink Express:

/opt/local/bin/wine ~/.wine/drive_c/"RMS Express"/"RMS Express.exe"

For VARA HF

/opt/local/bin/wine ~/.wine/drive_c/VARA/VARA.exe

73

Mark

VO1BS (HF station)

VO1MCH (VHF station)