UDP Tunnel via SSH Confusion

Overview:

I have a software program which communities on UDP port 1046 and I am hoping to hook two computers together.

• Laptop (Required to ALWAYS have VPN connection)


• Desktop (Public ip address)

Where I am:

I've seen various bridging tutorials but they seen to involve one computer serving as a proxy and not a direct bridge between the two systems. I have successfully managed to create a TCP bridge and I'm assuming its not too much harder to force the UDP traffic across that bridge

TCP Tunnel

On the "laptop" I run

ssh -N -L *:24804:localhost:24804 -R:24804:desktop:24804 user@desktop

which I believe creates a 2-way tunnel on the machines between TCP port 24804

I tried socat udp-listen:1046,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:24804 but when I launched my software it gave me an error that port 1046 was already in use

Is there a simple next step I'm completely missing here?

Thanks!