so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and finally got something resembling a working setup but the audio latency is driving me nuts. running RemoteHams RCForb client on the shack PC connected to a SDRplay RSP1A for the SDR side, and then using a separate audio path through mumble for the transmit audio going into the rig which is an IC-7300.

the whole thing is tunneled through a wireguard VPN back to my house and on a good day the latency sits around 180ms which is workable but not great. the problem is it just randomly spikes, like ill be in the middle of a QSO and suddenly theres like 400-500ms of delay and the other station thinks ive gone QRT or something. checked my internet connection both ends and its not obviously dropping packets or anything.

also curious if anyone has experimented with linking this kind of setup into an Echolink or AllStar node. i know its kind of mixing two different worlds but the idea of being able to jump into a local repeater remotely while also having the HF rig available through the same connection seems appealing. not sure if thats even a sensible thing to do or if im just overcomplicating everything

the latency spikes with wireguard over residential internet are almost always a QoS issue on one end or the other. if youre going through a standard cable or fiber modem/router the upstream is usually the bottleneck and when something else on the network decides to upload a backup or whatever it just murders your audio. worth looking at whether you can enable QoS on the router at the shack end and prioritize UDP traffic to the wireguard port. made a huge difference for me.

on the RemoteHams side specifically theres a jitter buffer setting in RCForb that i had set too aggressively low for a while thinking it would help with latency but it actually made the spikes worse because it had no headroom. bumping it up a little smoothed things out considerably even if nominal latency went up slightly. 200ms steady beats 150ms that randomly blows up to 500.

as for mixing it with echolink or allstar, yeah people do that, but id honestly keep them as separate logical paths. trying to route HF audio through an allstar node introduces its own codec artifacts and the latency stacks. echolink especially tends to add another 200ms+ depending on the node. if you just want to monitor a local repeater while working HF just get a cheap baofeng running on battery at the shack and point a microphone at it, not joking

yeah the allstar + remote HF thing is one of those ideas that sounds great until you actually try to implement it and then you realize every component in the chain wants to add its own delay and suddenly youre having conversations that feel like a moon bounce QSO. i went down that rabbit hole for a while.

what rig control software are you using alongside RCForb btw? i found that having both rigctld and the RCForb rig interface trying to talk to the 7300 at the same time over the same virtual COM port was causing some weird timing issues for me that kind of manifested as audio glitches weirdly enough, took me forever to figure out that was the culprit