Ham Radio Bingo

Ham Radio Bingo Card Generator

Ham radio has a thousand and one ways to operate, things that you could spend your life figuring out. Why not spice it up with challenges to do things a little more uniquely, especially for contests? Or even add spice to Field Day as people practice social distancing! Scoll down for your bingo card, and generate a unique one for you!

Your Ham Radio Bingo Card

         
         
    FREE    
         
         

Your Bingo Card is ready to be used. You can print out this page to use your bingo card for ham radio challenges.

Settings

Seed

Custom Items

Combinations

Pick 2 or 3 - Create Combinations like PR Puerto Rico - 20m or OH Ohio - 80m - 5 Contacts. Region and band selections come from 'categories' list.

 

Categories

Bingo Card Categories

You may select your bingo card challenge groups right here. Make it as hard (or as simple) as you want. Clicking 'New Card With Settings' will recreate the same card seen on the page now. Changing the seed without changing selected categories will generate a new card with the same groups as before. If you wish to save a copy of your bingo card, just 'print' the page! You will get your bingo card and only your bingo card.

Many thanks to the countless individuals who helped make this possible, supplying ideas and constantly encouraging! Thank you! List ideas are always welcome, see below to contact us.

Ways To Play

There is more than one way to play! There is of course the traditional way with completing 5 items in a card in a row - vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. However you can go 'hard mode' and complete an entire bingo square! Get all 24 squares marked. And you can play alone, with as many cards as you care to generate, or agree with your club or friends on a set of categories and compete to see who can complete a card first, or who can complete the most cards in a set time! The sky's the limit.

Category Lists

Below lists out all the possible items in each category that could appear in your bingo card. New suggestions are welcome, see footer for contact information!

About

This project started many years ago as a small bingo card generator for National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo. After two years of sporadic use the project was mostly abandoned and forgotten.

Fast forward to 2020 - and the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in clubs staying at home, people practicing social distancing, and gatherings cancelled. During a talk with the local club, the Stillwater Amateur Radio Association, about what we might do for Field Day plans the old card generator popped back up. It led to the thought of 'could this be used to give our club, and other hams, something to do to keep excitement for Field Day when we can't normally get together and operate together?' Cue a few nights of digging through the old code, updating and converting from PHP to Javascript, and setting up a server and learning to do responsive designs for web and mobile, and the Ham Radio Bingo Card Generator was born.

It is my sincere hope that this little generator can be used by hams the world over, for Field Days, contests, and even just for fun alone or together. Feedback and input, including list suggestion ideas, are always welcome! May this be a thing which brightens your days ahead!

There are many thanks to be given on this project - to several key pieces of open source software that went into its creation (more info here). Thanks also have to be given to my outstanding friends and amazing fellow club members whom have put up with countless messages and emails asking for feedback, whom have provided ideas to further enhance the experience, and encourage me when I get stuck. That goes even moreso to my YL, whom has worked to ensure I eat and do other things in the push to design this. And I want to thank as well the local ARRL state and division reps, whom once they learned of the project have also been supremely supportive. This is why the ham radio community has become such a part of my life, so many supportive people. To each and every one of you, thank you.

73, Collin O'Connor, KE0IYN