RepeaterPhone Unable to Connect to Various AllStarLink Nodes

[Kevin L. Walton]

July 14, 2025

 

Hello.  I’ve been using RepeaterPhone for a few years now.  Never had issues connecting to just about every AllStarLink node out there… but over the last year, or so… I’ve noticed that I’m no longer able to connect to my favorite nodes.

 

I’ve chatted with some of the admins, and they seem to have a problem with the fact that RepeaterPhone users come into the system without an ASL node number and have asked me to request one for my existing ASL account.

 

I did, but that doesn’t seem to do anything, as the RepeaterPhone app doesn’t have a place to add the ASL node number.

 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

Kevin

N4RMF

[Chris Smart (ve3rwj)]

Hi Kevin,

 

Repeaterphone is not a node. It connects using something called Web Transceive.

It doesn’t matter if you have a node number assigned to you on the website, if you don’t have an actual node.

 

The Clearnode from Node Ventures is popular, as is the Shari from www.kits4hams.com

 

The M1KE device from SharkRF can also act as an Allstar node.

 

There are other ways to build your own node as well.

 

Chris

 

[Tim Sawyer]

I've mentioned in other places that repeaterphone and other ASL clients that don't have a node number are undesirable from a system point of view. Don't get me wrong, I love repeater phone but not having a node number presents problems to node owners. For that reason some (perhaps more and more) node owners are disabling the ability of node number less clients from connecting. 

I think repeater phone and other "Web Transceiver" type clients should rewrite their apps to have a node number and http register like regular nodes. 

[Patrick Perdue]

I'd think using HTTP registration, while best for ASL's registration servers, would present some interesting problems with many mobile providers, such as T-Mobile and AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada, where IPV6 is preferred, and multiple IPV4 addresses for different protocols are used.

This being said, DVSwitch Mobile has Node Mode, which uses a node number rather than a token. Wes has explained some reasons why Repeaterphone doesn't do that a while back, and I'll leave it up to him to bring those points up again. Something to do with Apple's limitations and UDP packets, which may be a thing that HTTP registration would fix, if not for the high potential for IP address mismatches.

DVSM's Node Mode isn't fool-proof, either. It doesn't report statistics, and some node owners (WIN system) are very particular about that. M1KE has the same limitation, I'm pretty sure.

Also, it could take a while for all nodes to notice your new IP address as the local cache of online nodes is updated. This is perhaps less of a problem with ASL3 and HamVoIP making up the majority of nodes, and both using DNS lookup by default now, but it is still a potential problem, especially considering how fast IP addresses can change in the mobile space.

You can fix that by using a VPN endpoint on a static IP address, or controlling a node in the cloud who's IP never changes, but none of this stuff is particularly end-user friendly.

So, basically, I don't know what the right answer is here, but it's definitely an issue.

Yeah, use Repeaterphone if you don't have an Allstarlink node, unless you want to connect here, here or here, because those nodes don't like WT connections.

But, you can use Repeaterphone to connect to another ASL node using it's IAX stanza that you control, then link that to your favorite node that doesn't allow WT connections... lots more setup that way, and not everyone can or is willing to put all that effort into it. You could even theoretically do this with IAX_Bridge, created by the DVSwitch folks, without setting up a full ASL node. Documentation is minimal, and some basic Linux knowledge is required, so, again, not something everyone will want to do.

On my system, the Blind Hams Network, I have a dedicated node for WT, which makes it much easier for me to deal with any issues that come up, and they do, occasionally, but again, not everyone has that kind of infrastructure.

My system has several geographically diverse nodes to spread the load more evenly, hopefully lower latency, etc. so it wasn't a big deal to shoehorn WT to a specific place.

At least ASL3 now makes it much easier to blacklist/disconnect non-numeric nodes. Some work would have to be done to re-create that functionality on older nodes, such as HamVoIP, which hasn't had an update in nearly two years, but is still widely used for various reasons.

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