On the Air for Django’s 20th Birthday: Special Event Station W2D
Back in July, we celebrated a very special occasion: Django’s 20th birthday 🎉 To mark the occasion, three amateur radio operators (including myself) spent the next 14 days, operating evenings and weekends, broadcasting a special event call sign: W2D.
Over those two weeks, we completed 1,026 radio contacts with radio operators in 47 geopolitical entities (for example, the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii are considered separate entities). The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues special event "call signs" for these types of events. We selected W2D for 20 years of Django, but the reference to "Web 2.0" during Django's early years was a bonus!
Over 7,000 lookups were counted on a main callsign lookup site as radio operators checked into what W2D was about. Ham radio is a very popular activity, with more than 750,000 licensed hams in the US!
We created a custom certificate inspired by the design of the Django admin interface for those who made contact with us (certificates are common / expected for events like this in the radio hobby). Here is a sample one, other amateurs contacting the event were able to generate/download their own Django admin inspired certificate from a Django site (which does repeat for those who contacted us multiple times):
Thank you to the amateur radio operators who made the event possible and of course those who contacted us! Thanks to you this was a fun time for us all. Additionally, thank you to the Django Software Foundation and its members who make the Django Web Framework and its community possible.
This screenshot shows 3 other stations (ON7EQ from Belgium, PC2J from the Netherlands, and WA4NFO from the US all calling W2D on "20 meters" (14 MHz, so named because the wavelength would be 20 meters long per wave) All of the orange bubbles in the map show the other stations receiving the signal from W2D being transmitted with 30 watts of RF power. The antenna is an approximately 63 foot long piece of wire running between a balcony and a fence post.
This map shows approximate locations of each geopolitical entity worked during the special event and a count of contacts made in each.
Check out our birthday website for more events – up next, PyDay + Cumple Django organized by PyLadies Colombia in Bogotá 🇨🇴 💛💙❤️
