Use the latest (beta) version of d-rats if you can. You can get it from http://www.d-rats.com/download/beta/
The internet channel hosted by KK7DS that you can connect to for A.R.E.S. of Champaign County nets is ref.drats.com, and the port # we use for our nets is 9001. You configure this in the Radio section of the Preferences (port 9000 is a chat reflector, not good for nets).
The server at N9DN's house is ratf.n9dn.net also port 9001. This is the reflector that is our local one, and it should work equally well for our net. It is usually connected to ref.drats.com:9001, and the radio is set to either 145.530 DV simplex or on Net Night, the W9YR D-STAR repeater.
The transfer settings (Under Radio->Transfers in preferences) you need for file transfers to work reasonably well through a local repeater are
For Simplex operation, these settings should work fine as well. You can likely decrease the warmup length to 4 and warmup timeout to 2, you can also drop the force transmission delay as well. All stations need to have matching settings for best performance.
For stations to send email via your D-RATS station, you need to do 3 things:
To receive email via your D-RATS station, you need to do two things: