WINMOR

10 July 2020 -- The Board of Directors of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation voted in a recent virtual meeting to deprecate the WINMOR HF mode in the Winlink system. The protocol was introduced by its author Rick Muething, KN6KB, at the 2008 ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference in Chicago. It was the first popular 'sound card' radio mode to offer an alternative to HF hardware modems for bulk digital transport. Rick moved on by developing the Amateur Radio Digital Open Protocol (ARDOP), which was introduced in 2015 as a replacement to WINMOR with superior speed, robustness, and multiple bandwidth options. Nevertheless, until recently, WINMOR remained popular for learning and experimentation while other more robust and better-performing new modes became the workhorses of Winlink message transport.

The Winlink Team now devotes its resources to other projects and will drop support for WINMOR on the Winlink system. Other modes offer the same advantages with superior performance.

We request all HF RMS gateway sysops still offering WINMOR to remove it in favor of ARDOP, VARA HF and Pactor 3 or 4, where permitted by local rules. In an upcoming release WINMOR will be removed from Winlink Team software, making way for better, speedier, more robust and modern HF digital modes. WINMOR had a good, long and productive run.

--The ARSFI Board of Directors
--The Winlink Development Team

Here is a short status report on the development of ARDOP, a new, flexible protocol for messaging.

Read about ARDOP (Amateur Radio Digital Open Protocol).
The Yahoo ARDOP forum site (which has beta downloads and documentation) is at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ardop_users/info
The ARDOP Developers forum (installs, docs and sources) is at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ardop_development

At the end of 2016, we are near the end of beta testing for the ARDOP_Win TNC (protocol optimization). John Wiseman has also written a version of ARDOP that works with BPQ32 (Server or Client) and can connect to the Winlink system. We are working on integration into Winlink Express and RMS Trimode which will provide client and portals into the Winlink system. Eventually, ARDOP is planned to replace WINMOR (more robust, more bandwidth options, faster) but that won't happen until we have really wrung out the above implementations and optimized the protocol. The conversion from WINMOR will be a simple software change and resetting the setup parameters.

Also, a future (now in testing) hardware implementation (in C operating under Linux on a Teensie quad core processor) will be announced next year. It will permit seamless (no additional sound card or external hardware) and easy integration with other protocols like Pactor and Packet.

Watch this space for more news. 2017 will be the year Winlink moves to ARDOP.

Rick KN6KB
Winlink Development Team