Remote/portable personal node.

Similar setup to MB7AZE but without the connection to Echolink and monitoring fewer TalkGroups. I use TG 8 as a testing ground to keep my traffic off the rest of the system.

Usual method of deployment is to use a small MiFi 4G router as an access point for the Raspberry Pi to reach the internet. When this is in use the node is on an inaccessible remote network and I can't access it to make changes or shut it down.

I use a “Remote SSH Tunnel” to get access to it from my home LAN.

The idea is that the remote node makes a SSH connection to a machine on my LAN (I have an open port in the router forwarded to an internal machine for SSH access. This is straightforward, the remote Pi is logged on to my PC in the shack.

Along with this incoming connection from the remote node is the request to set up a “Remote Tunnel” - this makes the internal PC here set up a listening SSH port and a connection to it will be sent backwards to the remote node, hidden within the existing SSH connection.

This tunnel will now accept incoming connections from machines inside my LAN and forward them to the remote node. I can now effectively SSH to the remote SVXLink node as if it were on my LAN in the shack.

The magic is all done in SSH, but to make it more robust I use a package called autossh which is a wrapper around SSH that monitors for loss of the tunnel connection and initiates a new connection automatically if it should fail for any reason.

Here is the script that fires it all off:

John Pumford-Green Wed May 4 11:25:01 2022

Page Updated : 06/03/25 06:49 GMT