A Simple to Use And Extremely Powerful VPN Connects everything, Even a Remote Flex Radio

Like many others, I live in a crowded place with more neighbors than space around the house. While this is a good thing for quality life, it is less than satisfactory for a HAM Radio operator.
There are mainly two solutions to this dilemma: A divorce with a move to a remote location or a remote station. Because I love my wife, a remote station is a proper solution.
Today we will cover one of the most critical topics of such a project: Connect the Flex Radio at the remote station to our shack PC at home. Fortunately, we can use the same technology to connect securely to your home network from everywhere without the hassle of OpenVPN or Wireguard. Secure, simple, and free of charge! So this knowledge is valid for most of us.

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[Rouverius]

Wait... I know this voice! Very happy to stumble onto your second channel today.
Yes, I agree. A remote station is the wiser of the two solutions 😁

[peter.stimpel]

There is only one thing I would be worried about in this nice setup: you need to rely on a single cloud software supplier. So many bad experiences. So I decided for myself to refuse the use of such services as long as there are no alternatives in case the original supplier stops its services.

[geekthesteve]

Remember, if you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold, per Andrew Lewis (and others).

[TeltonikaNetworks]

Thanks for such an informative as well as useful video. Great to see our RUTX14 in action!

[rjung_ch]

Andreas, you are so funny! Your wife must have chuckled too.

[farqhart]

Educational video as always. Would seem that ZeroTier should also work for Starlink considering Starlink's use of CGNAT too. Insofar as the hardware price, looks like the cellular approach might be a bit less expensive than Starlink. So I'm wondering about the ongoing cellular costs and comparative performance between Starlink and cellular. Starlink monthly charge in Switzerland appears to be around $99 USD.

[lesourire]

It took some effort to figure out how to actually get zerotier working, but I agree it's better! Nice find. Thank you so much.

[DanielHofer]

Thank you for this right in time video - I was searching for a remote solution to control Meshtastic-Nodes (reboot, firmware-update, ...) with an attached Raspberry Pi Zero with UMTS-USB-Modem connected. With Zerotier and your great explanation, I was up and running in less than one hour with this task. Great! 73, OE2DHH

[karlfrederick]

Nicely done. Excellent overview and walkthrough. I also have a Flex radio working w/ Starlink & ZeroTeir, since around Spring 2022 at a remote site. Glad to see your setup on 4G is also working via ZeroTier.

[LievenHollevoet]

Hey Andreas. I am using the same principle but with Tailscale instead of Zerotier to access my QO-100 station that runs on a RPi from remote. Works like a charm. 73 de ON8HZ

[jmr]

I use a Cloudflare tunnel for a similar setup. I'm not sure how well it works with mobile though as I haven't test that.

[shephusted]

wireguard does not need any account - it is all free and internal and you can run it on a phone easily

[nonamesi]

IIRC Mikrotik 7.x partially supports zerotier so you could use that (and not use it on every single device you connect to the network), and in case of wireguard, you could use if only the clients use CGNAT. The server should either have a public IP address or normal NAT and port forwarding... But ZT is probably easier to configure

[Chris_In_Texas]

Strange that I use Wireguard all the time on cellular without any issues. I have wireguard VPN server built into my router/firewall at home and am homed to multiple service providers here in the states. This allows full connectivity to my home network and the ability to access all of my VLANs remotely.

[didotb]

For those who doesn't want to re-setup a new network:
3:20 "Deleting" a device actually means "banning" it from the network. You have to unban it first before you can add it back again.
Unbanning a device is as easy as inviting the device from the control panel before the device joins. The problem is getting the network ID of the device, no other way but to ask the device owner.

[mahudson]

Great toys! Question: is the cellular bandwidth in a single area so wide (are several bands used) that you needed a log periodic or would a yagi have done the job?

[scienteer]

Zerotier and Tailscale are really powerful. 👌 if I can be a little pedantic and say those antennas are Yagi nor Log periodic don't block me.

[juri]

Tips:
-Dont use the built in Modem of the RTU, theyr realy slow, its just lte cat 4 from 2014, so realy old. i use multiple netgear m1(by now they old to, but theyr at least lte cat 16 and do over 1gb/s down, in theory)
- the rtu has gpio pins, use them to restart equipment if its no longer responding

[guysmith]

I wonder if IPv6 would also be a solution for this project? Cellular providers seem to mostly provide IPv6 addresses which are all globally routable. I am not sure if the cellular providers will just block all incomming connections though.

[maxvideodrome]

I seem to have a problem with my ZeroTier. It has high-latency at times (terrible for VoIP applications, and my ICOM 9700 remote use). This is not a problem with the broadband, but something with the ZT system. I use Mikrotik ZT and Windows ZT clients. I cannot figure out the problem - even with the suggested port being forwarded.