If you are a member of the Packet Cavalry you might give some consideration to making the third Friday of each month a bit easier by creating and using one or more templates. Using a template allows the user to pre-populate fields inside a message such as “To”, “From”, “Subject” and more. Additionally, Tags can be used within the fields to assist in completing the form and reduce the need to keyboard information into the form. Examples of Tags include “Date”, “Day”, “Time” and several others.

Template files can be created in any text editor that allows you to save the file in a “txt” file format. Once created it should be placed in the RMS Express directory.

Below is a template created for use from my home in support of the ARCHES. One can see it will tell RMS Express that this message is intended for Tom N5TW, Jim K5HTK-1 and Dick W5TA. The Subject line indicates the date and location from which the message was sent; you will only need to type in the “via” station at the end of the subject line (see the message example below) and finally the body of the message will be populated with the text following “Msg:”

Sample Template Text

Type: Winlink

To:W5TA-1, K7MAL-1

From:CC:

Subj: Check-in <Date> from KF5EXC via

Msg: This message is being sent via radio from KF5EXC in support of the weekly Williamson County ARES packet report.

Via Packet WL2K

73

Bob KF5EXC

When used the sample Template above will produce the message form below

In this example I’m sending a message from my home and the template populates everything except the station through which I plan to send the message (in the subject line following “via”.

For those of you who are like myself and do not either Keyboard or spell well the use of templates will greatly reduce the potential error rate and should speed up your packet efforts.

The bottom line is Templates are not that difficult to create and very easy to use. To learn more check out the Help file within RMS Express and search the index for “Template”

73

KF5EXC