Hello, I have seen a few older topics that cover similar issues, but some seem to be prior to asl3 and/or don’t cover the scenario I’m describing. I recently got my ham ticket and stumbled across this platform. It is really very amazing and impressive what you all have accomplished over the years.
I have a small business with multiple locations, we use part 90 radios to communicate internally at each location but they are not linked. I also have some folks that work from home and are not able to communicate on the radios, so they need to call in and have someone at the office relay their request. It looks to me like allstarlink is the perfect solution for our pain points.
I plan to deploy a small rpi based node at each physical location connected via a URI to a part 90 radio. David NR9V at AllScan has created some great hardware that really makes this possible. Then I will also deploy radioless rpi nodes at the work from home sites. I plan to connect all of these nodes to a common Azure hosted hub.
In my testing, I have had no issue with registering these devices using the public registry, but the callsign for these units are different than my ham callsign, and I don’t want to risk a user connecting to another node and then end up transmitting on a ham frequency. So, I would like to link these all as private nodes instead.
I saw on one prior forum post that private hubs are not possible, but this was unclear to me because I thought that a hub is just a node without a radio. I attempted to create private links but I see there is a requirement to have 2 way communication for a private link. Specifically for the work from home nodes, I have no control over their network and I would not be able to port forward even if I were able to add a dynamic dns registration into the raspberry pi.
So, my actual question is as follows. I would like to create a private hub, is there a method I can have nodes register into this hub in a manner similar to the way other nodes connect to register.allstarlink.org? Is there another solution to link private nodes that does not require that I have access to the firewall at the remote location so I can deploy my nodes on networks that I do not control?
W6MFB