so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and im at the point where i think i know just enough to be dangerous. my main shack is at a rural property about 90 miles from where i actually live and the plan was to run everything over the internet using RemoteHams with an SDR front end — specifically im using an RTL-SDR v3 feeding into a upconverter for HF coverage, tied into a raspberry pi running the RemoteHams server software.

the control side works okay, like i can key the rig (got an IC-7300 as the main tx) and the audio passthrough is usable most of the time. but the SDR piece is where things get weird. latency on the waterfall display is all over the place and sometimes the SDR stream and the actual audio from the 7300 get so out of sync that im clicking on signals that arent where i think they are on the panadapter. feels like a timing/buffering issue but ive already messed with the buffer settings in the software and cant seem to nail it down.

also been thinking about whether it makes more sense to just ditch the RTL-SDR approach entirely and use something like a dedicated panadapter output directly from the 7300 via USB since it has that built in — but then im not sure if RemoteHams handles that cleanly or if id need to go full SDR radio replacement like an Anan or something. anyone running a hybrid setup like this and actually happy with it? feel like im reinventing the wheel here.

yeah the sync issue you're describing is pretty classic with that kind of hybrid setup. the problem is the RTL-SDR stream and your audio path from the 7300 are going through completely different pipelines — the SDR is going through one set of buffers and the rig audio is going through another and they have no shared clock reference so they drift. its not really a RemoteHams problem per se, its just what happens when you bolt two unrelated streams together over a WAN connection.

honestly if you already have the 7300 i would just use its built-in USB audio and the IQ output you can get from it for the panadapter. the scope output on the 7300 over RemoteHams isnt perfect but at least everything is coming from one source so the timing is more coherent. ive been running a remote IC-7610 setup for about two years and went through the same headaches you're describing before i stopped trying to use a separate SDR and just leaned on what the radio already gives you. the latency is still there obviously but at least its consistent latency which you can mentally compensate for.

the Anan path is another option but thats a whole different rabbit hole and youll spend six months learning that software before you're actually on the air reliably.

curious what your upstream bandwidth looks like at the rural site. ive found that a lot of these sync/drift issues people blame on software are actually just asymmetric bandwidth doing weird things to the streams — especially if youre on a rural connection that might be satellite or older DSL where upload is really constrained. the SDR stream is pretty greedy compared to just voice audio and if theyre competing for the same upload pipe things get messy fast.

also not sure if you tried this but theres a guy on the RemoteHams forums who posted a config a while back for running the IC-7300 USB in a way that uses the radios own panadapter data instead of a separate SDR and apparently it cleans things up considerably. cant remember his callsign but worth digging through the threads over there if you havent already.