so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for the past couple months and i finally got my shack set up with RemoteHams RCForb client talking to the server software at home, works pretty well actually for SSB but im now wanting to add an SDR front end and thats where im getting confused

the station is running an IC-7300 right now and the audio chain through the RemoteHams server is decent enough but latency gets annoying on digital modes, i was reading about people running an RTL-SDR or even an Airspy alongside their main rig for a panadapter view remotely and i cant figure out if RemoteHams has native SDR support baked in or if youre supposed to run something like SDR-Console or HDSDR in parallel and then somehow mux that into the remote session

also completely separate question but related — has anyone compared just doing this the RemoteHams way vs setting up an Echolink or IRLP node and doing internet linking that way instead? i know theyre kind of different things philosophically but for just getting on the air from a remote location without being physically there, wondering if one approach has advantages over the other for someone whos mostly doing HF rag chewing and occasional digital

running everything through a 50 down 10 up fiber connection at the home end so bandwidth isnt really the issue, more just trying to figure out the right architecture before i go buying more hardware

the SDR side of this — yeah RemoteHams doesnt really do native SDR panadapter stuff in any clean way last time i checked, what most people do is run SDR-Console server on the same machine and then connect to that separately on the client end, its a bit clunky having two windows open but it actually works pretty well once you get the PPM correction dialed in on the RTL stick so its frequency accurate against the main rig

Airspy HF+ is worth the extra money if you want the dynamic range to match anything close to the 7300s receiver, the cheap RTL dongles are fine for casual panadapter use but if youre on 40m during a contest the thing gets overloaded and its kind of useless

on your Echolink vs remote HF question thats kind of apples and oranges honestly, Echolink and IRLP are fundamentally VHF/UHF linking with phone patch over internet, youre not actually operating HF youre just accessing a repeater remotely, RemoteHams gives you actual third-party-control of the rig which is a completely different thing and for HF rag chewing theres really no comparison, RemoteHams wins easily if the latency is manageable

latency on digital modes through RemoteHams drove me crazy too, ended up just running WSJT-X with a VAC virtual audio cable looped through the remote audio stream and it mostly works for FT8 but you really need the home-end machine to be doing all the heavy lifting, like the decoding and timing needs to happen at the station not on your remote client end or the timing just falls apart

honestly for FT8 specifically i just leave WSJT-X running on the shack PC and remote desktop into the whole thing with TeamViewer instead of using RCForb at all, way less elegant but it solved basically every timing problem i was having, audio latency doesnt matter when the audio never leaves the local machine