There are many threads about running an ASIAir with (home) WiFi, but I was surprised to see almost none about running/controlling it at a 'truly' remote location.
To define what is meant by 'truly' remote location: a location that is out of reach of any WiFi and cabling but still with cellular coverage. I am restricted to using such a remote location - the setup is thus not permanent and needs to be packed up after each imaging session.
Judging from how rarely this is ever mentioned, running an ASIAir in such an environment is seemingly a very niche thing to do - at least if there is also any intention to control it remotely. I saw a discussion in a different forum mentioning port forwardings on a separate mobile router but it sounded very complicated, risky and did not get into any details.
Ultimately, I found a solution that works for me and I am sharing here, just in case it might help others looking to overcome a similar challenge.
A key point for this approach is that cellular internet is being used, which has its own limitations. I have a secondary, older smartphone with 4G which I leave on site with an open WiFi hotspot.
The following basic chart roughly illustrates the setup:
To monitor the area, I am running a Wyze cam which is a little surveillance camera. As long as the cam has internet connection, the video live feed is displayed in its dedicated app from anywhere - very easy and straightforward. Unfortunately, the same is not possible with the ASIAir. Over multiple attempts, it was actually very frustrating to gradually learn that despite the onsite area being 'online', there is no way to have the ASIAir connect in a way that I could access it over the app from my home area through the internet directly. Apparently it is not designed for this, which is a serious limitation in my opinion.
My solution is a tiny mobile travel router and a service called 'Tailscale'. Tailscale is a mesh VPN service that connects devices and services across different networks. For such kinds of simple usage scenarios the service is free - an account needs to be created and the devices in question need to be added. Once they are in the same virtual network and online, they can talk to each other.
In above example, the ASIAir in station mode connects to the travel router WiFi. The travel router connects to the iPhone hotspot and is thus online and in the Tailscale virtual network automatically. From my Android phone at home with Tailscale switched on, I can then open the ASIAir app and reach the ASIAir by typing in its internal, reserved IP address.
The configuration effort for this network setup is minimal, but it does help a lot to use a travel router with native Tailscale support.
Cellular data consumption considerations
Of course, a big drawback of this solution is the usage of expensive/limited cellular data. I reached out to ZWO directly to ask about the ASIAir data consumption behavior, but was told since it is not designed for this usage it was never tested. So I did my own tests, all of below are for 7 hour imaging sessions, ASI2600mm at Bin1 (~50MB FITS files), 5 min subs:
- ASIAir app open in Preview mode or running in background permanently --> 5.59GB
- ASIAir app open in Guiding menu permanently --> 14.7GB
- ASIAir app closed and used just for occasional checks --> 53MB
It is interesting to see that depending on the menu opened, the data consumption difers. I assume the huge value in the guiding menu scenario is due to the ASIAir additionally streaming the guide camera live feed. Personally, for me it would be enough to just see the guide graph constantly - then occasionally I might want to download one single image on demand to check, or send some commands. All of this would not result in any meaningful traffic, but there is no option to deactivate the automatic download of images/display of guide cam view.
As a consequence, I am now using it by mostly having the app closed and doing my checks, plan changes and such just a few times over the course of a session to keep data consumption at bay.
This is obviously a compromise solution, but for anyone who needs to control their setup from wherever they are without the need to go to the onsite area multiple times a night, it might be helpful.