so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. i travel a lot for work and the idea of being able to hit my IC-7300 from a hotel room or whatever is really appealing. i already have a pretty stable fiber connection at home so bandwidth isnt really the issue.

ive looked at RemoteHams and the RCForb server/client setup and it seems solid but i keep reading about people just rolling their own thing with a raspberry pi and some combination of VPN plus rigctld and fldigi or whatever. the RemoteHams SDR remote stuff also caught my eye — seems like you can share your station or access other peoples rigs which is kind of a cool concept actually.

my main concern is latency when it comes to SSB phone. like CW or digital modes i imagine are more forgiving but trying to have an actual QSO on voice with a half second delay sounds rough. anyone running RemoteHams for serious SSB work and how bad is it really? also curious if anyone has set up internet linking through something like this and tied it into an echolink node or similar — seems like that could get complicated fast.

not trying to overthink it but i also dont want to spend a weekend configuring stuff only to find out the audio is unusable from a hotel wifi

the latency thing is real but honestly it depends way more on your hotel's upload than anything else. i ran RCForb for about two years controling my 7610 remotely and SSB is totally workable as long as both ends have decent connections. the trick is you kind of have to unlearn the habit of jumping in right when a pause happens — you need to wait just a beat longer than normal or youll step on people constantly. takes maybe a session or two to get used to it.

the RemoteHams SDR remote side is interesting but i mostly used it for accessing other peoples WebSDR-style setups when i just wanted to listen around and see what was happening on a band i couldnt work from wherever i was. the actual remote control of your own rig is the more useful part imo. one thing i will say — get the audio codec settings dialed in before you leave home. there's nothing worse than being in a hotel at midnight trying to figure out why your mic audio sounds like a tin can over the remote link. opus at a reasonable bitrate worked best for me, YMMV with your specific setup

yeah i went down the DIY VPN rabbit hole and its definitely doable but took me way longer than i expected to get everything playing nice together. the rigctld stuff is finicky and if you want PTT to work reliably over the remote link thats another whole thing to sort out depending on your interface. RemoteHams at least has most of that wrapped up in one package even if you're giving up some flexibility. i think for most people who just want to operate and not spend weekends debugging systemd services its probably the easier path