so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. my main shack is at a rural property about 90 miles from where i actually live most of the time and ive got decent internet out there, maybe 25 down 8 up on a fixed wireless link which isnt perfect but workable. right now im running a basic teamviewer situation to control the rig directly but its clunky and the latency on the audio is driving me nuts.

somebody at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a bit, seems like they have their own protocol and client software. but then i also saw people talking about using an SDR backend — like running SDR-IQ or even an airspy as the receiver side and piping that through remotehams or some other internet linking stack. im not totally clear on how that fits together honestly.

has anyone actually set this up and used it day to day? not just tested it on a sunday afternoon but like actually operated through it regularly. curious how well the audio holds up under marginal internet and whether the SDR approach gives you anything real over just using a conventional rig with a remote head or something like the IC-705 over wifi.

also wondering how this compares to just doing EchoLink or IRLP linking which i know is more repeater oriented but theres overlap in the infrastructure thinking at least. anyway any real world experience appreciated

been running a remote setup for about two years now, not exactly the same as what you're describing but close enough. I use RemoteHams with a conventional transceiver on the remote end — IC-7300 — and the RRC-1258 microbit controllers for the audio and CAT side of things. works pretty well, the RemoteHams protocol is more efficient than just throwing a VNC session at it.

the SDR backend thing is real but kind of a different use case. if youre trying to actually transmit you still need a real rig on the remote end with a license and all that. the SDR receive-only setup through remotehams is neat for monitoring but its not going to let you work a pileup obviously. that said the wideband view you get from something like an airspy remote is genuinely useful for spotting, you can see the whole band at once and cherry pick where to operate.

your 8 up should be fine for audio, remotehams doesnt chew through a ton of bandwidth compared to what you might think. the latency matters more than raw throughput honestly. if your fixed wireless has consistent latency under like 80ms or so youll be okay for SSB, CW gets trickier if youre used to tight keying.

i tried the SDR remote thing for a while and gave up on it tbh, not because the concept is bad but the software stack i was using kept falling over whenever my ISP burped. ended up just going with a straight remote rig setup and using some homebrew python scripts to restart stuff automatically when connections drop. less elegant but it actually stays up.

the echolink comparison isnt really apples to apples btw, echolink and IRLP are linking repeaters or doing voice over IP to a handheld port essentially, the audio codec is optimized for voice and thats kinda it. remote rig stuff youre actually controlling a real transceiver and the audio chain is trying to preserve the actual received signal not just make voice intelligible. different goals. though i have seen people do weird hybrid setups where they link a remote sdr into an echolink node for monitoring which is kinda janky but creative i guess