How Flexitnode came to be — a box in a field, and a problem that would not go away.
Ian, VK1HF, wanted something quite specific: a box in a field. Totally off‑grid, connected by Starlink, running entirely on 12 volts, and as simple as it could possibly be.
He is a network engineer, a cloud architect and a cyber security professional by trade, so when CG‑NAT turned out to be the thing standing in the way, he engineered his way around it. He was sceptical it would really hold up. It did — and it worked a great deal better than he had expected.
That station is called IKARA. It is still running today, and you can go and look at it yourself: ikara.vk1hf.com.
Then Ian met Ed, K5YZW, who had been wrestling with the very same problems and getting every bit as frustrated by them. So Ian built him a version of IKARA — a little different, this one, because Ed has mains power at his site. That station is called ALAMO, at alamo.k5yzw.com. It works superbly well. Ask Ed yourself.
At which point the obvious thought turned up: plenty of other people have this same problem, and none of them should have to engineer their way out of it from scratch. What was wanted was a drop‑in appliance rather than a bespoke build every time. Flexitnode seemed like a good name for it.
And that is how it all came to be.