so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a station at my parents place about 90 miles away, kenwood ts-590sg, a decent triband yagi up about 40 feet, and i want to be able to run it from home when band conditions look good. right now i just have a VPN into a raspberry pi and i use some janky combo of hamlib and a webcam pointed at the rig which honestly works but its embarrassing how ugly the whole thing is.

someone at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a bit. seems like theres the regular remote client software and then theres the SDR side of things where you can expose the station as kind of a software defined radio endpoint? i dont fully understand how that part works. like is it streaming the raw IQ data or is it doing something else. and can other people actually access your station or is that only if you set it up as a public node or whatever they call it.

also the internet linking piece confuses me — is that more like EchoLink/AllStar type stuff baked in or is that totally separate. ive been using AllStar for a few years so im not a stranger to VoIP linking but this seems like a different beast entirely.

anyway just wondering if anyone has actually run this setup long term and whether its stable enough to actually trust for contesting or if its more of a casual ragchew type solution. my upload at the remote site is only about 15 megabit which i dont think should be a problem but wanted to sanity check that too.

been running a remote setup through RemoteHams for about two years now, different rig (IC-7300) but same general idea. the SDR piece — its not streaming raw IQ the way like SDR# or SDRuno would. its more like compressed audio with some metadata on the side, its proprietary but it works pretty well once you tune the codec settings. latency is usually fine for SSB, i wouldnt try to do CW at high speeds over it unless your connection is rock solid both ends.

the internet linking thing is kind of a separate feature honestly, you can tie it into repeater linking but most people just use it for the remote desktop style access to the transceiver. 15 megabit upload is more than enough, ive done it on way less. biggest pain for me was setting up the port forwarding and making sure my parents router didnt drop the connection every few days. ended up putting a small script that pings out every few minutes just to keep the NAT table happy.

yeah the public node thing — you only share your station if you explicitly opt into that. its not like it just opens up to randos by default, you have to register it and set permissions. i looked into doing that for our club station but we decided against it mostly because nobody wanted to deal with the liability questions if someone did something dumb with our call sign remotely.

for your use case though, 90 miles, your own equipment, sounds like it should work fine. i will say the client software on windows has been pretty solid in my experience but i tried the mac client once and that was kind of a mess, might be better now i havent checked in a while. if your main goal is contesting id probably also look at what N1MM does with remote stuff, theres some integration options there that might matter to you depending on how you log.