so ive been trying to get my remote station dialed in for the past few weeks and im at my wits end with the audio side of things. quick background: i've got an IC-7300 at the remote end running through RemoteHams RCForb server software, internet connection at the shack is about 25Mbps down and maybe 5 up, which i thought would be plenty. the SDR piece is where it gets weird — im also pulling in a separate SDR stream via WebSDR for a panadapter view since the 7300's scope doesnt translate super cleanly over the remote link, at least not in my experience.

the audio drops happen randomly, sometimes every few minutes, sometimes i get a solid 30 minutes of no issues and then bam it just cuts out. i dont think its the internet connection itself because my ping stays pretty stable when i check it. latency to the remote site is around 40ms which seems fine. i've messed with the jitter buffer settings in RCForb and bumped it up a bit but havent noticed a huge difference. codec is set to OPUS at 32kbps which i figured was a reasonable middle ground.

anyone been through this? wondering if its worth trying to set up a dedicated VLAN just for the radio traffic to keep it separate from the rest of the house network or if thats overkill. also curious if anyone has used the internet linking side for connecting to a local repeater while running remote — im thinking about tying into a nearby Allstar node but not sure how that plays with RemoteHams at the same time.

the jitter buffer thing is almost always the culprit in my experience with RCForb. 32kbps OPUS should be totally fine for that upload speed, thats not your problem. what i'd look at is whether your router is doing any kind of traffic shaping or QoS that might be randomly throttling UDP packets — OPUS over RemoteHams uses UDP and some consumer routers get weird with it, especially if you have other stuff happening on the network at the same time.

also check if you have any kind of antivirus or firewall that might be doing deep packet inspection. had a situation a while back where my security software was basically adding random latency spikes to UDP streams and it drove me nuts for weeks before i figured it out. the drops werent consistent which made it really hard to diagnose.

as for the Allstar + RemoteHams question, technically you can do both but you probably want to be careful about audio routing so you dont end up with a feedback loop or double-keying situation. i havent personally run both simultaneously but i dont see why it wouldnt work if you get the PTT logic sorted out correctly.

yeah 40ms round trip shouldnt be causing drops, that's totally workable. i remote into a station thats like 800 miles away and the latency is higher than that and it works fine most of the time. honestly the separate WebSDR panadapter idea is kind of clever but i wonder if its adding to the problem — pulling two streams at once even if they're independent might be enough to occasionally saturate something in the path, maybe not the internet link itself but maybe the CPU on your local machine or something weird with your NIC.

the VLAN idea isnt overkill honestly, i set one up for my shack traffic and it made a noticeable difference in consistency. nothing magical about it, just keeps the bufferbloat from my kids streaming video from messing with the radio stuff. if your router supports it its worth trying before you start chasing hardware problems.