so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, got a pretty solid setup at my home QTH running a IC-7300 and a remote desktop solution that works ok but honestly the latency has been killing me on CW especially. figured i'd look into RemoteHams since a few people in my local club mentioned it but i cant find a whole lot of real-world info about combining it with an SDR frontend and then linking that over the internet to another node or repeater system.

the basic idea i had was using something like an RTL-SDR or maybe a proper SDR like an Airspy on the receive side at the remote end, feeding into the RemoteHams client on my end here at the house, and then using some kind of echolink or IRLP style linking for the tx side when i actually want to transmit. is that even how people are doing this or am i completely overthinking it and the RemoteHams software just handles all that already

the main thing i care about is getting decent audio latency for voice and being able to actually use the waterfall remotely without it being a slide show. running about a 50mbit connection on the home end and the remote site has about 25 up so that shouldnt be the bottleneck i think

yeah i ran almost exactly this setup for about two years before i moved and took the station down. RemoteHams itself has its own audio codec stuff baked in and it actually handles latency pretty well compared to raw RDP or VNC solutions, the default codec settings worked fine for SSB but i did have to tweak the buffer sizes a bit to get CW tolerable. not great but workable.

the SDR integration part is where it gets complicated though. RemoteHams RCForb client can show a panadapter if your radio supports it natively via USB or if you feed it a CAT-linked SDR but its not really designed to be an SDR receiver on its own, its more of a radio control interface. if you want a proper waterfall from an Airspy or RTL you're probably looking at running SDR# or SDRangel at the remote end and screensharing just that window which is kinda janky but people do it. or there's stuff like openwebrx running as a local server at the remote site and you just browse to it, that works surprisingly well for monitoring.

the linking part to echolink or IRLP is kind of a separate thing entirely, those are really repeater linking protocols and unless youre trying to tie your remote station into a repeater network i wouldnt go down that road. if you just want to operate HF remotely RemoteHams or something like hamlib + a web interface is probably cleaner

25mbps upload at the remote site is plenty, i run mine on less than 5 and the audio is fine. your bottleneck is almost always going to be latency not bandwidth, like whats the actual ping between the two locations? if youre going cross country or worse internationally even 200ms can make SSB feel weird and CW basically unworkable unless you really turn up the sidetone locally and just dont listen to the actual transmitted audio