Setting Up Tailscale to Use With Amateur Radio Apps

Let’s start first with what Tailscale is. Tailscale is a VPN for your devices giving you access to them even while you are not on your home network to use them directly. There are some things you can do with this system to better help you with amateur radio. In this article we will go over setting up Tailscale to use with your Allstar Node, and why we may want to do this.

Allstar Nodes do like to be on a stable network, with that if your IP address is constantly shifting like it does on a mobile network you may not get connected to the Allstar Network not allowing you to connect your node to other nodes. A way around this issue is using Tailscale and setting an Exit node on your Tailscale network to trick your device into thinking that it’s still on your home network. You will not be able to accept inbound connections to your device while it is running through an exit node. Another advantage to this is you can monitor your Allmon3 dashboard remotely from any devices that are within your Tailscale network.

Setting up Tailscale is quite simple, and its free, So lets get started.

Our first step would be to go to Tailscale.com and sign up for a Free personal account.

After you set up your account you will be prompted to add your first device to your account.

For your Allstar node you will select the linux option and put the “curl” command provided in the terminal. It should look like below:

# sudo curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

After the installation is complete in terminal type:

# sudo tailscale up

This will prompt you to go to a website to sign into your Tailscale account on your Allstar node. This must be done from a different computer. Once authenticated you will see it on your device list on Tailscale, then your terminal will move back into a state where you can type more commands.

You can then add other devices to your Tailscale network, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

To set up an exit node go to the Tailscale program on the remote device and select “Exit Node”. Then select “Run as Exit Node”. This now can be used to set as an exit node for other devices.

On your Allstar node go back to the Terminal and type:

# sudo tailscale set --exit-node=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (this is the Tailscale IP address the device you wish to use as an Exit Node.)

This will route all traffic from that device to exit out of the device being used as an exit node giving it a stable IP address. Again, you will not be able to take inbound connections while using the exit node. This is mainly due to the way your phone gets internet connections from your mobile carrier.

To remove the exit node simply in the terminal simply run:

# sudo tailscale set --exit-node=