Hamword is a Winlink-based game that mimics the popular five-letter word guessing game Wordle. It was started to give hams a way to practice their Winlink skills while having fun thinking about an unknown five-letter word. Hamword has just completed its second year of operation, and its impressive stats are shown below. This game has gained an international audience, with hams from at least 22 countries playing along. Play the Game You can join the fun by sending a five-letter word to the Winlink tactical callsign HAMWORD. You do not have to send messages using your radio connection. Winlink messages can be transferred over the Internet using the Telnet interface. For more information about the game, Winlink, and the Hamword Leaderboard are available at https://hambooks.org/hamword/. Recent Updates If you have been playing Hamword recently, you will have noticed some updates to the game. Or, start playing to see these new features. Game timing has been adjusted to Statistics are available on the leaderboard pages at https://hambooks.org/hamword/menu. Charts of player activities have been added. Individual scores Streaks Incompletes Emergency Communications Practice If you are an ARES leader or run some Winlink drills, feel free to add playing a Hamword game to your skills tasks. Ask your members to send a Winlink message to HAMWORD and play the game. It’s also a great way to test your digital emergency communication equipment without additional assistance. Second Year Statistics For those of you keeping score, in the first year, we have: an average of 78 folks playing the game every week. https://hambooks.org/hamword/previousweeks/. About 380 hams have played the game. The past scores are on the leaderboard page at https://hambooks.org/hamword/leaderboard/. 41 of the 50 states have played Hamword https://hambooks.org/hamword/states/. We are missing responses from Alaska, Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming. Please play along if you or your friends are from one of these targeted states! 57 of the 71 ARRL sections that have played the game https://hambooks.org/hamword/sections/. 22 countries playing the game https://hambooks.org/hamword/countries /. 5,700 individual games have been played. over sent/received over 73,000 Winlink messages in the two years. So, keep playing to improve or practice your Winlink skills. Spread the word, compete with your friends, and demonstrate how we can send and receive emails via radio using HAMWORD. Graphic Performance Data Graphs like the one shown here show how your games have been played. You can also check your friend’s progress and get averages for each section, state, or country.
I started playing again about week ago. Started back in 2022. Its great practice. Though today it is hard to get into any of the nodes. Kent K9EZ
Are you having propagation difficulties? Or some other trouble? Sending these messages is a great way to learn what node works best for you. Our local guys play "round robin" with the nodes that work best for them, to make sure they know how propagation works for them. Of course the VHF and telnet nodes are always a "straight shot." Welcome "back."
HAMWORD is a very clever adaptation of the technology and indeed good practice for using Winlink and that subset of applicable amateur radio skills. I played for awhile and enjoyed it. Even my XYL joined in to help solve the puzzle. Apologies for the following TL;DR, but here it goes ... Difficulty getting into Winlink HF nodes was what caused me to lapse in playing it and eventually drop out. I preferred to use HF out of convienence with my present setup and as other means just did not seem as relevent, especially Telnet of course. However, the effort of finding an HF node was enlightening as to the limits and variability of HF propagation, especially local groundwave and regional NVIS. Often I had to find and use an open band and node that was accessible via DX skywave. Also I am curious why the 60m band is not utilized by more nodes. NOTE - Have not signed into WL for over a year. While writing this post I launched Winlink Express (v 1.6.6.0) to check for updates etc. It gave me an error message saying essentially "User (callsign) not found". Tried to sign in to my account via the browser and it also would not connect, same issue, as if my account had been disabled. Tried the PW reset several times and the web site balked, errored, did not send any email. Finally just used Winlink Express to Open Session with Telnet. Bang. It got in and received a message from the System with a recovery PW. Now able to log in. However all my account info was gone, so re-entered. Put recovery PW into Winlink Express and it signs in ok on Telnet, but I get rejected by HF nodes. Huh. Perhaps the new PW and other acct data changes take awhile to spread throughout the system? Will keep trying later. Sigh. I take philosophical issue with applying the word "Emergency" to most any Amateur Radio communications. That scenario is for First Responders, and as a service, generally not the call of amateurs. Only in rare extreme cases does AR ever get close to playing a role and then its not usually with PC's, permanent base antennas, and higher QRO at the incident site. Instead its performed by HT- mobile simplex or prepped / quickly put together FD / Go Kit SOTA/POTA style with non-data analog simplex modes, ops using mics or keys. See the story of Hurricane Maria. As such I do not consider WinLink as much of an emergency communications asset. It may though have a role to play in health & welfare or other types of traffic to disconnected or remote areas over an extended longer term. And I admire it as a technology accomplishment worthy of keeping around and advancing, just in case. However, I am disapponted that the adoption of Winlink has come at the abandonment of training hams building skills in the use of traditional amateur modes in urgent situations, such as message passing via voice, or text via Morse Code. The ARRL's treatment of their legacy network for that, the National Traffic System (NTS) is abhorrent. No wonder it was picked up and has been sustained and advanced by Radio Relay International and increasingly lately with MARS. Morse Code is an IDEAL medium to message for help in a true emergency. Short, QRP, flexible. Easily deployed, see agn prepper SOTA/POTA. It's a shame that the skills to use it in that capacity, even rudimentary, are not more developed on-the-air by HAMWORD. To that end I suggest that HAMWORD consider another medium in which to play the game. Create and deploy automated gateways, nodes, that utilize Morse Code (CW). These could be either HF or VHF FM (MCW). Perhaps webSDR's like Kiwi could be employed as remote receive sites and connected via web with various other big signal tranmission points. HAMWORD messages are certainly brief enough to make that practical. I suggest the former Radio Sputnik (RS) ROBOT system as an example model which generated Morse Code CW QSO's in a similar way. Anyway, thanks, and keep up the word play! 73, John, WØPV
I am having a lot of propagation problems. I run down the list and very few I can connect with. I need to work this out for hurricane season. Some of my usual nodes are not responding. I see some people connecting with QRP radios. I am running 100 W to a G5RV and should get in. I am working with our ham club to put up an HF and VHF node. We are working with VarAC as well.
John, THANKS for the TL; DR. I love the feedback. I'm glad you were able to get your XYL involved. I've gotten lots of messages to that effect about kids, XYLs, and parents! I never thought he would have such a widespread presence among friends and family! Yes, node selection is more an art than a science. Many of our folks run low power and have good luck in the 3W to 10W range. Most are using simple wire antennas, but the secret is learning what bands/nodes work best for your area, time of day, and hop distance. We initially thought close-in stations would be better, but our Oklahoma folks usually hit Illinois, South Texas, Colorado, and Iowa. Time of day and propagation let's folks run between 80M and 20M on a typical day. The neat thing about the game is that it gives you multiple chances per week to learn the nodes. Your "Callsign not found" error is a 'feature' of Winlink. If you haven't logged into Winlink in the past 400 days, your account is removed. Just as you did, the remedy is to start over. The password update should be immediate, keep trying, though. "I take philosophical issue with applying the word "Emergency" to most any Amateur Radio communications. That scenario is for First Responders, and as a service, generally not the call of amateurs." I agree with your discussion; however, that word choice was deliberate. We have a number of city, county, and state EMs that use this to test their communications systems. They typically have weekly voice nets, and they make the Hamword connections to test out their data networks while waiting for voice traffic. I agree with you on the NTS aspect. Here in Oklahoma and Hawaii, the primary NTS transfer is over Winlink (https://ok.arrl.org/ntsok/). In fact I passed two Radiograms last week that came in from Canada. We integrate that through RRI and we still have folks who hit the phone and CW traffic nets, but they have told me that they're ready to roll out of those roles. That's why we built the NTSOK system a couple of years ago, to handle the traffic. What we've found is that the hams with the kilowatt amps and the 80-meter loops are getting fewer and farther in between. The majority of our 'new hams' are in HOAs, cities, and suburbs. There are plenty of ways to make this happen, and we're using them all. I run a Morse Code trainer that sends out emails with links to code practice snippets. Over 35,000 email messages have been sent out, and 1,200 folks from around the globe have participated in the system. CW interest is still out there. Yes, this could be sent via CW, but my goal is to increase the use and familiarity with Winlink. Thanks for the kind words, John!
Thanks. The state info comes from the QRZ registry, which comes from the FCC registry. So, if you were mobile, that wouldn't be tracked. Let me know when you were out there, and I'll adjust the records! Keep up the good work!
Here's some more TL;DR You were correct Mark. My account deactivation was a working WL feature It successfully reactivated after the website PW reset and subsequent Telnet connection reply. Eventually the new PW was updated throughout the system and HF nodes started accepting my connections. So just for fun, I took a run at this weeks HAMWORD, and even successfully completed it! Now my call sign shows up on your newly updated stats. Until viewing your QRZ bio later I did not realize you are the ARRL OK SM. Congrats on being very active in that role and for AR in general, including sponsoring the LearnMorse Code program. Regarding the NTSOK System, etc, glad to see the ARRL ARES-RACES org begin to recognize and rejuvenate NTS, mend fences and coordinate with RRI. For me the overly emphasized focus for years of ARES on LOCAL RF communications, mostly via FM repeater infrastructures, has not been helpful to teach new radio amateurs the most useful core skills and assets for public service contingencies; ie being able to set up and operate ad hoc, even using analog means, when required, most importantly over medium to long hauls, without infrastructure like The Internet or an active data terminal at the incident ie PC-Pad-Smartfone. Here in FL where the threat of potential widespread communications infrastructure outages are very real annually, at least they are also trying to extablish VHF and 10m SIMPLEX phone nets. Skills to use that in a pinch can solve rapidly evolving incidents or "Last Mile" issues. I hope the ARRL / SM's continue to realize that the HF nets also have to be kept up and maintained in some way too. More on that later. Regarding WinLink, I am not against it in any way, certainly not as others for its automated use of our allocated spectrum, as long as it remains properly self-regulated. Use It Or Lose IT! My concern is just that NTS comms (or even real non-ham EMCOM) becomes more and more KEYBOARD TEXT CENTRIC ONLY, requiring extra working DEVICES of some sort to accomplish any message transfer. An unneccssarily complex single point of failure. Passing info via analog RF signals, originated by humans directly operating voice or OOK Morse, even if it is to and from an A.I. "control" entity (NCSystem), seems a more prudent way for hams to plan for "When All Else Fails". Hence the suggestion that attention be paid by those with development moxie to move beyond just WL and create ROBOT-styled voice-Morse interactive automated nodes, HF & VHF, that can interpret & process properly formed commands and relay that or added on info, via either radio-to-radio or node-to-web, including possible conversion of that analog input info to text data and formatted email. Making that into a game like HAMWORD would be a good way to introduce such functions. It's heartening to see the ARRL on their website still promotes the playing of CHESS human to human, even if sometimes via EchoLink. Anyway, again, good luck with WL HAMWORD and all your other projects! 73, John, WØPV
John, Good information all around. The neat thing about RRI is that they integrate with all modes. Winlink, digital, phone, and CW nets. The good thing is that all modes use the same 'procedures,' so flipping between modes is easy to do, and allows one to choose the best mode for the situation. And, thanks for the chess information. I'm working on a process to play chess over Winlink. (Bummer that they've already used my working title of Hamchess<G>.) 73 - Mark
