so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now using RemoteHams and for the most part its been solid but lately ive been getting these random dropouts that kill the connection right in the middle of a contact. were talking fully mid-sentence, the audio just cuts and then i have to wait for the RCForb client to time out and reconnect which takes like 30-40 seconds and by then the other station has moved on

the weird thing is it doesnt seem related to band conditions or anything obvious. happens on 40m at night, happens on 20m during the day, doesnt matter. the station is running a Flex 6600 at the remote end with a pretty decent internet connection — last i checked it was pulling around 50 down and 15 up which should be more than enough for this. my end at home is also fine, ive done speedtests during the dropout and theres nothing wrong there either

ive already bumped the keepalive interval in the server config and that didnt seem to help. wondering if anyone else has had this and figured out what was causing it. is this a UDP thing? i vaguely remember reading somewhere that some routers throttle UDP streams after a certain duration but i cant find the thread now

yeah i had something almost identical last year with my remote setup, different software but same symptom. turned out to be my ISP doing some kind of traffic shaping on UDP after a sustained connection that hit a certain duration threshold. basically if you hold an active UDP stream open for more than like 20 minutes some consumer routers and certain ISPs just quietly drop the state table entry and the packets start going nowhere

what i did was switch the server to use a slightly lower audio bitrate which reduced the packet rate enough that it stopped triggering whatever threshold was causing it, and also put a small keepalive ping on a separate TCP channel. not sure if RemoteHams has a config option for that specifically but worth digging through the server settings. also check if your router at the remote site has a UDP timeout setting in the firewall config — my old Asus router had it buried in the advanced NAT options and it was set to something stupid like 30 seconds

could also just be the Flex itself going into some kind of idle state? i dont use RemoteHams but i remote my 6300 over SmartSDR and ive seen it do weird things when the DAX audio pipeline gets confused. probably different issue but worth checking the Flex event log on the remote machine if you have access to it. sometimes theres stuff in there that doesnt show up anywhere obvious