UHF repeater node with VHF link radio

Our club setup currently is a UHF repeater near town with allstar node connected. Sitting next to that is a cross band UHF/VHF repeater linking to our VHF repeater on the mountain top 16 miles away. There is no inernet available at this site. It is owned by the forest service and they will not allow installation of internet. Coverage is fantastic on our VHF out to about 125 miles reliably, however, in town, we are blocked by the mountain range so the UHF crossband makes that connection for us. The allstar node consists of a rpi 4 using the masters communications dra30m interface to the repeater. I have a second dra30m that I would like to use to put the VHF transciever into the node also thereby creating a link radio without the full crossband repeater. I believe this can be accomplished, but I am not able to find enough documentation to facilitate it on my end. It is my understanding that I would/could create a second node number in the server for the link radio and make the connection internally on the pi. I think it could be either a public node or a private node. I have created the private node, however, so far I have not been able to establish a connection between it and my public node. Do any of you have a cheat sheet or setup sheet that can assist me in achieving my goal?

Thinking this is the essence of the issue you are reporting....
Have you defined a line in rpt.conf for that private node for connection under
[nodes]
1000 = radio@127.0.0.1:4569/1000,NONE ; dummy private

Node# - address as seen from this machine(127.0.0.1 is internal this box) : portnumber

Also see the manual or the wiki on private nodes.

Mike, thank you very much for that help. I swear I had done that already, multiple times, I even created different ports 4570-4571 and tried it, but for some reason this time, it worked. I was able to establish the connection between private and public.

No is there anyone who can offer insight into the link I want to create? can you suggest what type of connection I should use, simpleusb or usbradio etc?

best 73

UPDATE*
although I am able to connect to the private node from the public, I cannot connect to the public from the private node. In my supermon, I can see the connection on my public node to the private but there is no connection showing in the private node. Same goes for Allmon3.

??

Is it on the same comuper ?

Or on a different computer inside the same NAT (behind the same router)

it is on the same pi.
I was able to figure that part out. connecting both ways now. was a port error in another file location.

I am trying to figure out how/where to edit the node description so that it shows up as "link radio node" instead of "node not in astdb please update database"

tomorrow i will try hooking the radio to the dra30m. i was successfully able to get both modules to ptt together.
check out the node at n5ad.net

For public nodes, Did you try the self service portal ?

For private nodes, see privatenodes.txt

yes, i checked each of those things. What I discovered is that apparently, the supermon install will create a privatenodes.txt in the /var/www/html/supermon directory but not one in the /etc/asterisk directory. I manually created one in the asterisk dir. then populated it, since populating the one in supermon had zero effect, then had to run the astdb.php and it worked. It seems to me that many others have experienced this same issue. i wonder why hasn't it been addressed in the installation to be corrected? In any case, I have managed to get everything working correctly. The link radio is working great on the private node linked up to my public node. There is one last issue I am researching and perhaps someone on here knows the answer. is there a way to remove the lag, between nodes, especially since they are on the same pi appliance? there is a 1 to 2 second delay from when either node goes into PTT before the other node does the same?