so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i finally got something reasonably stable running. the main rig is an IC-7300 out at my uncle's place about 40 miles away, good antenna situation out there, he's got a 3 element yagi for 20m and a vertical for the lower bands. the internet out there is just regular cable, nothing fancy, maybe 25 down and 5 up which i thought would be a problem but honestly hasnt been.

anyway i started with just RemoteHams basic client/server thing and it worked okay but the audio latency was driving me nuts especially on SSB, like you'd talk and then wait and it just felt weird. then someone on one of the other forums mentioned running an SDR alongside it, like having an rtl-sdr or an airspy just feeding a panadapter view over the same connection so you can actually see what's happening on the band without waiting for the main rig to sweep. that part actually works better than i expected.

the part i cant figure out is the internet linking side. i want to be able to use echolink or maybe allstar when im not doing HF, just to have the node active out there when the HF bands are dead. has anyone tried running all of this on the same hardware? im currently using a raspberry pi 4 and im wondering if that's enough horsepower or if i need to throw a small NUC or something at this. the pi does get a little warm sometimes and i wonder if its just throttling under load and thats causing some of the audio weirdness.

yeah i ran almost exactly this setup for about a year before i moved and had to tear it all down. the pi 4 is honestly borderline for that combo — it CAN do it but you'll hit walls. the thing that got me was when i had the RemoteHams server, an airspy mini running SDR++ server, and an allstar node all going at once, the cpu would spike whenever the RF environment got busy and yeah the audio would just fall apart. switched to an old dell optiplex i grabbed for like 40 bucks and the problems basically went away.

the latency thing on SSB is just kinda the nature of the beast with RemoteHams over a regular internet connection, you can tune the audio buffer settings down but then you get dropouts instead of latency so its kind of pick your poison. i found around 150ms was the sweet spot for my connection. also make sure you're using opus codec if you have that option, made a noticeable difference over the default.

the echolink and allstar coexistence question is something i looked at a while back. short answer is you really dont want both running simultaneously on the same node, they kind of fight over audio resources unless you get creative with virtual audio cables and some scripting. most people just pick one. allstar is more flexible if you want to do actual linking and have control over it, echolink is easier to set up if you just want occasional use.

for what its worth the remote HF piece and the internet linking piece dont really need to be on the same machine at all, you could run allstar on a cheap little orange pi or even an older pi 3 and leave the pi 4 dedicated to the 7300 remote stuff. splitting it up like that actually made my setup way more reliable because when one thing crashes it doesnt take everything else with it.