so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and I'm at this crossroads where I don't know if I should just commit to the RemoteHams ecosystem or keep trying to roll my own thing. Right now I have a Kenwood TS-590SG at the home QTH and I've been getting into it with hamlib over a VPN tunnel, works fine when it works but the latency kills me on SSB and forget about CW at anything above like 15 WPM.

So I started looking at RemoteHams and their SDR remote setup and honestly it looks pretty slick. The RCForb client seems to handle the audio compression decently and I've seen people say the latency is way more manageable. But im not sure if the SDR remote piece integrates cleanly or if thats a separate thing entirely. Like does the SDR remote in RemoteHams actually let you tune around and see a panadapter or is it more like just remote PTT and audio basically.

Also has anyone tried bridging RemoteHams into like an Allstar node or EchoLink link for internet linking stuff? I know thats kind of mixing two different worlds but I had this half-baked idea about accessing a local repeater remotely through the same setup. Probably overthinking it but curious if anyone's done something weird like that.

The RCForb client does have panadapter support but honestly it depends a lot on what SDR you have on the server side. If youre running something like an SDRplay or an RTL-SDR dongle alongside your transceiver it can display the spectrum but the refresh rate over a slow connection is kind of rough. I had mine set up with an RSP1A feeding the panoramic display while the 590 handled the actual TX and it worked okay, not great. The audio compression they use is pretty good for SSB, way better than trying to push raw audio over OpenVPN which is what I was doing before.

The Allstar idea is doable but its gonna be a mess to wire up. You'd basically be coming out of your remote station audio chain and feeding it into an Allstar node on the same machine or a separate pi. People do it but its a lot of moving parts and if one thing hiccups your whole link falls apart. I did something similar for a while connecting to a local club repeater remotely but I eventually just got a hotspot and called it a day.

yeah the latency thing is real, CW remote is kind of a pain no matter what you use unless your roundtrip is under like 30ms which basically means you gotta be in the same city as the station anyway. I gave up on keying CW remotely and just use it for digital and SSB rag chews now.

RemoteHams works fine for casual stuff but if you're doing anything serious like contesting or chasing DX where you need to be quick on the trigger it still feels a little sluggish. just my experience from maybe a year of using it on and off.