I had this out at SCaLE '25 as an example of a deployable AREDN network:
The rack concept was developed for personal testing, but after last year's hurricane in North Carolina, was further developed as a hybrid network-in-a-box with easy off-grid power input which can be transported in a wide variety of vehicles: in your lap in a two-seater helicopter, strapped to the back of an ATV, in the passenger seat/bed of a pikcup, or just picked up and carried by the handles if need be. It serves as my test rack for AREDN firmware, my Pi OS image/scripting build environment, my backup network for my home rack, and a brickable Domain environment I can experiment on without taking down my main DCs/rack running important self-hosted applications.
Custom parts you may be interested in:
Ubiquiti UCG Ultra mount with Pi 5 tray
Ubiquiti Switch Ultra mount
Alberta Radio Supply half rack format 2U radio mounts My unit was a prototype; these are production. Contact Colin if you want something not shown, he was really helpful.
Power
This rack was designed to be a scalable, modular, and highly extensible network to make the best use of one or two Starlink connections during a wide variety of situations. All equipment was converted to run from a single 12V input with a power budget of 130W, so it can be powered from any vehicle 12V cigarette lighter socket. These connectors are also ubiquitous on lithium solar generators, or can be adapted from direct battery terminal connection. Using shielded 12V buck/boost converters for power also drastically lowers the RF noise signature of the system compared to a bunch of random switching power adapters. The power supplies are Meanwell voltage converters, each significantly over-specced for their estimated real world draw to leave significant thermal overhead for outdoor use in Arizona. They're each velcroed down and adapted to final output with Wago-style connectors to 5.5x2.1mm.
They're capable of delivering about 400W of PoE with the UCG Ultra switches. The DC fuse block bolted to the outside of the rack is fused at 40A, just below the 45A current rating of the connectors, and each circuit is fused slightly above the max sustained draw of any given device to protect the main fuse and power supply.
Since the rack is mobile, wiring can jostle or get snagged, potentially creating shorts which need to blow a low value fuse before they overcurrent the entire system. This also allows for easy hard rebooting of individual components by unplugging/reconnecting just that circuit. Automotive fuses were chosen since they're easily available in any town at auto parts stores which are open late, Walmart, and truck stops.
Starlink
The gray PoE adapter bolted to the top of the rack adapts Starlink to 12V input, delivering up to 200W of PoE (with the resistive snow melt function running) over a Cat 6 line to power a full-size Gen 3 Starlink transceiver. This makes deploying a high performance Starlink connection as compact as it can be, eliminating the need for their very large router and AC adapter. The flat Gen 3 dish itself is only a couple pounds and stows nicely in a nylon carry bag with its cabling and some spare adapters.
I got mine from this web store.
Network
The network is divided into two parts:
Unifi: Used to handle WAN inputs and load balancing/failover while providing the same VLANs I have on my home network, allowing for direct integration with the home rack via SD-WAN or Tailscale. It also provides a guest network with captive portal for more flexible use at low or no infrastructure events and integrates cleanly with my home domain using the mobile Domain Controller on one of the N100 micro servers.
There was theoretically some color coding happening here that mostly held up:
Black: Unifi network, no PoE.
Blue: Unifi network, PoE.
Yellow: WAN
Orange: AREDN, must adapt to 24V passive PoE.
Unifi WiFi, in conjunction with the abundance of PoE, allows this rack to act as a MicroPoP for a personal network, distributing wireless networking in several tiers (captive portal guest, trusted network, AREDN LAN, etc.) over a very wide area using WiFi 7 outdoor APs. This was tested to great effect at Winter Field Day 2025 and our local Christmas party, efficiently distributing one Starlink connection to dozens of users with reasonable bandwidth restrictions.
AREDN: The right Ace Magician N100 micro server runs virtualized AREDN in Proxmox. The AREDN network uses predefined VLANs on the Ultra switches for Layer 2 routing without needing to interact with the AREDN address space, so other nodes can be easily connected to the rack and receive DtD/WAN connections. The N100 acts as a permanent service connection point for virtualized applications, TNCs, and services running on the Pi 5. It also runs a DHCP server for providing addresses to the AREDN WiFi network running on Unifi. The network cleanly interfaces with AX.25 packet or other ham radio digital modes like VARA FM through the network Microsat TNC or digital TNCs, extending the functional reach of a single Starlink to hundreds of miles over VHF in good terrain, or thousands of miles over HF using an external HF transceiver like the G90 at SCaLE. As AREDN has matured and become more useful it's slowly taken over more space on the rack.
It hosts a whole bunch of very lightweight but useful services, besides simply acting as an AREDN network entry point:
- NTP/GPS server
- File server
- Offline AREDN firmware and docs repository
- AREDN flashing tools repository
- Speed test server (iperf3 and OpenSpeedTest)
- APRS-IS server
- APRS iGate/digipeater
- Very basic networked weather station
- AREDN MeshChat node
- Video conferencing server using Mirotalk
Time
Before AREDN had a native NTP function, the Pi 5 was serving as a Stratum 1 NTP server using a USB GPS receiver for a time source. This allows easily using a powered USB extension to get the receiver far from the rack if it needs to reach a window to pull time, and offers acceptable precision for synchronizing network devices which all just need to be on good relative time. AREDN nodes now natively offer an NTP option, so it's capable of boot strapping time for an entire network. The Pi 5 also runs a GPS server which allows location ingest for many ham radio applications which demand a Maidenhead locator, allowing multiple operators to automatically set their location to the rack's GPS receiver if running several Winlink receivers, WSJT-X, etc.
I had this out at SCaLE '25 as an example of a deployable AREDN network:
The rack concept was developed for personal testing, but after last year's hurricane in North Carolina, was further developed as a hybrid network-in-a-box with easy off-grid power input which can be transported in a wide variety of vehicles: in your lap in a two-seater helicopter, strapped to the back of an ATV, in the passenger seat/bed of a pikcup, or just picked up and carried by the handles if need be. It serves as my test rack for AREDN firmware, my Pi OS image/scripting build environment, my backup network for my home rack, and a brickable Domain environment I can experiment on without taking down my main DCs/rack running important self-hosted applications.
Custom parts you may be interested in:
Ubiquiti UCG Ultra mount with Pi 5 tray
Ubiquiti Switch Ultra mount
Alberta Radio Supply half rack format 2U radio mounts My unit was a prototype; these are production. Contact Colin if you want something not shown, he was really helpful.
Power
This rack was designed to be a scalable, modular, and highly extensible network to make the best use of one or two Starlink connections during a wide variety of situations. All equipment was converted to run from a single 12V input with a power budget of 130W, so it can be powered from any vehicle 12V cigarette lighter socket. These connectors are also ubiquitous on lithium solar generators, or can be adapted from direct battery terminal connection. Using shielded 12V buck/boost converters for power also drastically lowers the RF noise signature of the system compared to a bunch of random switching power adapters. The power supplies are Meanwell voltage converters, each significantly over-specced for their estimated real world draw to leave significant thermal overhead for outdoor use in Arizona. They're each velcroed down and adapted to final output with Wago-style connectors to 5.5x2.1mm.
They're capable of delivering about 400W of PoE with the UCG Ultra switches. The DC fuse block bolted to the outside of the rack is fused at 40A, just below the 45A current rating of the connectors, and each circuit is fused slightly above the max sustained draw of any given device to protect the main fuse and power supply.
Since the rack is mobile, wiring can jostle or get snagged, potentially creating shorts which need to blow a low value fuse before they overcurrent the entire system. This also allows for easy hard rebooting of individual components by unplugging/reconnecting just that circuit. Automotive fuses were chosen since they're easily available in any town at auto parts stores which are open late, Walmart, and truck stops.
Starlink
The gray PoE adapter bolted to the top of the rack adapts Starlink to 12V input, delivering up to 200W of PoE (with the resistive snow melt function running) over a Cat 6 line to power a full-size Gen 3 Starlink transceiver. This makes deploying a high performance Starlink connection as compact as it can be, eliminating the need for their very large router and AC adapter. The flat Gen 3 dish itself is only a couple pounds and stows nicely in a nylon carry bag with its cabling and some spare adapters.
I got mine from this web store.
Network
The network is divided into two parts:
Unifi: Used to handle WAN inputs and load balancing/failover while providing the same VLANs I have on my home network, allowing for direct integration with the home rack via SD-WAN or Tailscale. It also provides a guest network with captive portal for more flexible use at low or no infrastructure events and integrates cleanly with my home domain using the mobile Domain Controller on one of the N100 micro servers.
There was theoretically some color coding happening here that mostly held up:
Black: Unifi network, no PoE.
Blue: Unifi network, PoE.
Yellow: WAN
Orange: AREDN, must adapt to 24V passive PoE.
Unifi WiFi, in conjunction with the abundance of PoE, allows this rack to act as a MicroPoP for a personal network, distributing wireless networking in several tiers (captive portal guest, trusted network, AREDN LAN, etc.) over a very wide area using WiFi 7 outdoor APs. This was tested to great effect at Winter Field Day 2025 and our local Christmas party, efficiently distributing one Starlink connection to dozens of users with reasonable bandwidth restrictions.
AREDN: The right Ace Magician N100 micro server runs virtualized AREDN in Proxmox. The AREDN network uses predefined VLANs on the Ultra switches for Layer 2 routing without needing to interact with the AREDN address space, so other nodes can be easily connected to the rack and receive DtD/WAN connections. The N100 acts as a permanent service connection point for virtualized applications, TNCs, and services running on the Pi 5. It also runs a DHCP server for providing addresses to the AREDN WiFi network running on Unifi. The network cleanly interfaces with AX.25 packet or other ham radio digital modes like VARA FM through the network Microsat TNC or digital TNCs, extending the functional reach of a single Starlink to hundreds of miles over VHF in good terrain, or thousands of miles over HF using an external HF transceiver like the G90 at SCaLE. As AREDN has matured and become more useful it's slowly taken over more space on the rack.
It hosts a whole bunch of very lightweight but useful services, besides simply acting as an AREDN network entry point:
Time
Before AREDN had a native NTP function, the Pi 5 was serving as a Stratum 1 NTP server using a USB GPS receiver for a time source. This allows easily using a powered USB extension to get the receiver far from the rack if it needs to reach a window to pull time, and offers acceptable precision for synchronizing network devices which all just need to be on good relative time. AREDN nodes now natively offer an NTP option, so it's capable of boot strapping time for an entire network. The Pi 5 also runs a GPS server which allows location ingest for many ham radio applications which demand a Maidenhead locator, allowing multiple operators to automatically set their location to the rack's GPS receiver if running several Winlink receivers, WSJT-X, etc.