so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for a few months now and overall its pretty impressive for what it is, but im running into some weird latency stuff on the audio side that i cant quite nail down. my setup is a IC-7300 at the remote end feeding into the RemoteHams client software, and im running the RCForb client on the home end. the RF side of things works great honestly, decode is clean, the SDR waterfall behaves pretty well considering im on a 15mbps upload at the remote site.

the problem is the audio is lagging like 800ms to maybe a full second sometimes and it varies, doesnt seem tied to band conditions or anything obvious. ive tried bumping the audio buffer settings down and that helps a little but then i get dropouts. feels like theres something upstream of my setup thats introducing jitter but i cant figure out where to even start poking at it. the internet linking piece is what im suspicious of, like maybe something in how the packets are being prioritized on my router at the shack end.

anyone dealt with this before? running QoS on the router helps at all for something like this or is that kind of a bandaid on a bigger problem

yeah the audio latency thing with RCForb drove me nuts for a while too. what eventually fixed it for me was setting QoS specifically for the UDP port range that RemoteHams uses, think its somewhere around 50000-50100 but you'd want to double check that in the server config. also worth looking at whether your ISP is doing any traffic shaping on that connection, some of the cheaper business lines will throttle UDP pretty aggressively which will make that jitter all over the place.

the 800ms you're describing though, that sounds like more than just buffer settings. i'd grab wireshark on both ends and look at the actual packet timing before you spend too much time tweaking the software side. might be something as dumb as a cable modem that needs a reboot or a flaky ethernet run at the remote site. i chased what i thought was a software problem for three weeks and it turned out my cat5 run to the shack had a bad crimp on one end.

im using a similar setup but with a different radio and honestly the latency for SSB voice is the main reason i mostly just use it for monitoring and digital modes now. for FT8 and JS8Call it really doesnt matter much since you're not doing real time back and forth anyway. if you really need low latency remote voice operation you might want to look at something like a Raspberry Pi running a dedicated link with maybe AllStarLink or even just a simple audio bridge, some guys are doing really clean remote setups that way with sub 200ms round trip. RemoteHams is great for what it is but i think its more optimized for the SDR monitoring use case than like actual contesting or rag chewing remotely