If you’re planning an upcoming vacation or a business trip, taking your laptop, tablet or smartphone give you the ability to connect with friends or complete work on the go. But many hotels don’t have a secure wireless network setup or you’re limited on using a single device at once. Investing in a portable, mini travel router is a great way to connect all of your devices at once while having total control over your own personalized wireless network.
A logical combination of AP+STA mode on one physical radio allows most of OpenWrt/LEDE supported router devices to connect to a wireless hotspot/station (STA) and provide a wireless access point (AP) from that hotspot at the same time. Downside of this solution: whenever the STA interface looses the connection it will go into an active scan cycle which renders the radio unusable for AP mode operation, therefore the AP is taken down if the STA looses its association.
A logical combination of AP+STA mode on one physical radio allows most of OpenWrt supported router devices to connect to a wireless hotspot/station (STA) and provide a wireless access point (AP) from that hotspot at the same time. Downside of this solution: whenever the STA interface looses the connection it will go into an active scan cycle which renders the radio unusable for AP mode operation, therefore the AP is taken down if the STA looses its association.
To avoid these kind of deadlocks, travelmate set all station interfaces in an "always off" mode and connects automatically to available/configured hotspots.
## Main Features
* STA interfaces operating in an "always off" mode, to make sure that the AP is always accessible
* easy setup within normal OpenWrt/LEDE environment
* easy setup within normal OpenWrt environment
* strong LuCI-Support with builtin interface wizard and a wireless station manager
* fast uplink connections
* support all kinds of uplinks, incl. hidden and enterprise uplinks
* trigger- or automatic-mode support, the latter one is the default and checks the existing uplink connection regardless of ifdown event trigger actions every n seconds
* checks continuously the signal quality for conditional uplink (dis-) connections
* captive portal detection with internet online check and a 'heartbeat' function to keep the uplink connection up & running
* support of devices with multiple radios
* procd init and hotplug support
* runtime information available via LuCI & via 'status' init command
* status & debug logging to syslog
## Prerequisites
* [LEDE](https://www.lede-project.org) 17.01 or latest snapshot
* iwinfo for wlan scanning
* [OpenWrt](https://openwrt.org), tested with the stable release series (17.01.x) and with the latest OpenWrt snapshot
* iwinfo for wlan scanning, uclient-fetch for captive portal detection
## LEDE trunk Installation & Usage
* download the package [here](https://downloads.lede-project.org/snapshots/packages/x86_64/packages)
## Installation & Usage
* download the package [here](https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/packages/x86_64/packages)
* the application is located in LuCI under 'Services' menu
## Travelmate config options
* usually the pre-configured travelmate setup works quite well and no manual config overrides are needed, all listed options apply to the 'global' config section:
* trm\_enabled => main switch to enable/disable the travelmate service (default: '0', disabled)
* trm\_triggerdelay => additional trigger delay in seconds before travelmate processing starts (default: '2')
* trm\_triggerdelay => additional trigger delay in seconds before travelmate processing starts (int/default: '2')
## Runtime information
**receive travelmate runtime information:**
<pre><code>
::: travelmate runtime information
travelmate_version : 1.0.0
station_connection : true
station_id : blackhole/04:F0:21:2F:B7:64
station_interface : trm_wwan
station_radio : radio1
last_rundate : 15.12.2017 13:51:30
system : TP-LINK RE450, OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r5422+84-9fe59abef8
+ travelmate_status : connected (net ok/55)
+ travelmate_version : 1.1.0
+ station_id : Turris/-
+ station_interface : trm_wwan
+ station_radio : radio1
+ last_rundate : 19.02.2018 17:02:25
+ system : GL.iNet GL-AR750, OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r5988+25-60e07ffec5
</code></pre>
## Manual Setup
@ -123,10 +127,6 @@ edit /etc/config/travelmate and set 'trm_enabled' to '1'
**Q:** What happen with misconfigured uplinks, e.g. due to outdated wlan passwords?
**A:** Travelmate tries n times (default 3) to connect, then the respective uplink SSID will be marked / renamed to '_SSID_\_err'. In this case use the builtin wireless station manager to update your wireless credentials. To disable this functionality at all set the Connection Limit ('trm\_maxretry') to '0', which means unlimited retries.
**Q:** Is travelmate compatible with CC/Openwrt?
**A:** Travelmate was never tested with an ancient CC/OpenWrt release ... it should still work, but no promises.
[...] to be continued [...]
## Support
Please join the travelmate discussion in this [forum thread](https://forum.lede-project.org/t/travelmate-support-thread/5155) or contact me by [mail](mailto:dev@brenken.org)