UVARC Maker Net Recap — August 24, 2026
Three months in on 146.780 MHz, and Monday night's net turned into a bit of a milestone check-in on top of the usual bench reports. Here's the rundown.
Check-ins:
KK7RRW Wade LEHI
KK7UCF JANA ALPINE
K7JC JOHN Lake Forest Park
K2CES Clyde Alpine
KN0JI NOJI OREM
K7GSR Greg Riverton
N7BEB BRUCE SLC
KK7FON MATT OREM
K7SJC Jeff Orem
AJ7KY Kyle Pleasant Grove
KK7IKB DAVE SPANISH FORK
Bench Reports
Carl (K0WLY) got a mesh node fully built and running this week — complete with a 3D-printed case — and is already logging roughly 350 contacts stretching from southern Utah up into Wyoming on MeshCore. He also leveled up his CW Keyer: it can already play back an audio file through the keyer for decode practice, and now has an outboard sidetone path so you can monitor exactly what's being sent to the radio, plus phone-triggered canned messages like "CQ CQ CQ" and your callsign.
Jana (KK7UCF) spent time up on Mount Timpanogos and is on the hunt for a 3D-printed NanoVNA probe holder spotted at a recent club meeting — turns out **Jeff (K7SJC)** made it and offered to share where to get one.
Jeff (K7SJC) didn't get any bench time in this week — with his wife eyeing a move to a condo, he's three books deep on stealth, apartment-friendly antennas instead.
Clyde (K2CES) had a big week: dishes duty complete, and he sat beside his wife as she passed her Amateur Extra exam with flying colors — while he passed his own General upgrade the same day. He also held down the fort with the dog while she was up at Emerald Lake with an emergency response/search-and-rescue team.
Noji (KN0JI) didn't have a report this week but checked in to say hi — he's neck-deep in projects, most notably helping his son with the ARDF (direction-finding) project.
Greg (K7GSR) built a fast command-line callsign lookup tool to help identify partial callsigns heard on HF — cached the whole database locally for near-instant lookups, refreshed every couple of weeks. Built it with an AI coding assistant for about a dollar in compute cost.
Bruce (N7BEB) is building a fold-up Moxon-style directional antenna for 2m, aimed at portable use with a 2m CW QRP fox-hunt project, and picked up an M5Stack Tab5 to try as a pan adapter with his QRP rig. He's also running Meshtastic on channel 51 (per the 801 Labs group's testing) and seeing several hundred nodes from Ogden to Spanish Fork and up toward Logan — he's weighing switching a node over to MeshCore, which Carl confirmed is what he's running.
Kyle (AJ7KY) tuned up an end-fed half-wave antenna with his NanoVNA and got it working well, along with wrestling some drone motor troubles.
Three Months In: Why We're Here
Carl marked the net's third month on the air by asking everyone why they show up, what they expected, and where they'd like to see it go. The answers were a nice reminder of what this net is about: people come for the build talk instead of just check-ins and traffic, for the 3D-printing show-and-tell, for a local Utah crew to bounce project ideas off of, and — for more than a few — just to listen, learn, and be inspired by what everyone else is tinkering with. A few takeaways for the road ahead: more publicity (maybe a spot on UVARC's official net schedule) to pull in folks beyond Utah and Salt Lake counties, and real interest in an in-person maker meetup for builds and presentations.
Carl's already acting on that: he's got 25 CW Keyer boards ready to go (SMD components pre-populated, just through-hole soldering left) and three irons on hand for a group build session, plus another QRP Labs QMX+ group build in the works.
New Project Idea: Taming Solar Inverter Noise
Wade (KK7RRW) is dealing with heavy HF interference from his solar inverter at full output and is looking into toroid's and filtering options. Carl suggested borrowing a spectrum analyzer from within the group to pin down exactly which frequencies are affected — a good first step toward designing the right filter.
Magic Smoke Award
This week's award goes to KN0JI
whose fox transmitter's 9V battery connector got twisted and shorted while he was adjusting a wire — resulting in a burned-up connector and a solid puff of smoke. Certificate incoming!
Housekeeping
KN0JI has added the Maker Net to UARC's official net schedule, per Bruce's suggestion last week — so it's now easier for new folks to find us. (And for the record: KN0JI is UARC's newsletter/chief editor, not secretary — Carl stands corrected.)
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Got write-ups, links, or photos to go with your report? Send them to k0wly.ham@gmail.com and they'll be added here. Join the conversation on the UVARC Slack **#makernet** channel, and catch the full audio on this blog. See you next Monday at 146.780!
73 and happy making — K0WLY
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