so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i finally got a somewhat stable setup but im not totally happy with it. running a K3 at the home QTH with a raspi handling the audio routing and using RemoteHams client software on the laptop end. works okay on 40m and 20m but anything above like 15m gets choppy audio and i cant figure out if its a latency thing or something in my codec settings.

what got me curious is i started looking at adding an SDR receiver in parallel — i have an old RTL-SDR dongle sitting around and was thinking i could feed that into the remote setup so i have a wider panadapter view while operating. seen some stuff about RemoteHams having SDR support but the docs are kinda sparse and half the forum posts i find are from like 2017 so who knows if any of it still applies.

also curious if anyone has done internet linking through this kind of setup, not talking about echolink or anything like that, more like bridging two remote stations so a buddy of mine who runs a remote in vermont could relay through my station. maybe thats overthinking it but the idea has been rattling around. anyone done something similar or know if the latency just kills it?

the choppy audio above 15m is almost definitely not the codec — ive seen that same thing and it turned out to be the raspi just getting overwhelmed when band noise gets unpredictable and the AGC starts doing weird things through the audio chain. what sample rate are you running the audio at? if youre at 48k try dropping to 32k and see if it smooths out. sounds counterintuitive but the lower rate actually reduced CPU load enough on my pi 3 that the whole thing stopped stuttering.

on the SDR side yeah RemoteHams has had panadapter support for a while but its finicky. you basically need to run SDR# or HDSDR locally at the remote end and pipe the IQ data out through a virtual audio cable situation, then the client software picks it up. ive got this working with an Airspy mini and it actually works really well for spotting signals before tuning the main rig over. the RTL-SDR should technically work but the phase noise on those cheap dongles gets annoying when youre trying to do serious operating, youll see birdies all over the place.

the linking idea between two remote stations sounds cool in theory but the double latency would probably drive you nuts. even at 150ms one way youre already noticing it, stack two hops and youre pushing 300-400ms which is rough for anything except maybe slow digital modes.

yeah been running a remote setup for a couple years, nothing fancy but it works. i never bothered with the SDR integration just because my internet at the remote site is satellite and the extra IQ data stream just tanks the whole connection. so i cant really help there but wanted to say the linking idea isnt as crazy as it sounds — there are guys doing mesh setups with multiple remote nodes, usually over VPN tunnels, and it can work if both ends have solid low latency connections. the vermont thing sounds like it depends entirely on what kind of pipe your buddy has up there. vermont rural internet can be pretty rough from what ive heard lol.