so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a combination of hamlib, a cheap VPS, and some port forwarding that frankly i dont fully understand anymore because i set it up drunk one night and it just worked. anyway its been mostly fine for HF but ive been looking at RemoteHams more seriously lately because a buddy of mine swears by it and says the SDR integration is actually usable now.

my main question is whether anyone has actually used the RemoteHams client with a real SDR backend, like an SDRplay or an Airspy hanging off the remote end, or if most people are just using it with conventional transceivers and the audio pipe. i tried to find documentation on this but the RemoteHams site is kind of all over the place and i couldnt tell if the SDR remote stuff is a separate thing entirely or if its baked into the main client now.

also curious about internet linking in this context — i have an AllStar node at the remote site already for local repeater stuff and i was wondering if anyone has tried to bridge that with a remote HF setup in any meaningful way or if thats just a terrible idea that sounds clever at 2am

the SDR side of RemoteHams is kind of a separate beast honestly. last time i dug into it they had the RCForb client handling most of the conventional rig stuff and then there was a different SDR mode that felt bolted on. i ran an SDRplay RSP1A at my remote QTH for a while feeding into it and the latency was... acceptable is probably the word. not great. anything more than about 150ms round trip and trying to actually tune around feels sluggish enough to be annoying.

your AllStar idea isnt crazy but i think youre describing two different problems that dont actually overlap much. AllStar is great for linking repeaters and doing phone patches and whatever but its not gonna help you with HF remote control in any direct way. unless youre thinking of using the VOIP side to carry audio somehow, which people have done in weird janky ways but i wouldnt recommend it when you have a proper internet connection already. whats your upstream bandwidth like at the remote site, thats usually where people hit the wall

been using RemoteHams for maybe 8 months with a 7300 at a friends tower site about 40 miles away. works pretty well for what i need which is mostly just getting on 40m at night when my HOA situation makes local operating a pain. i havent touched the SDR features at all so cant help you there but the basic rig control and audio is solid once you get the server side configured right, that part took me way longer than it should have.

one thing i will say is dont sleep on the PTT latency issue if you plan to do anything other than casual ragchewing. contesting with a remote is its own kind of miserable experience and i say that having tried it. digital modes are way more forgiving obviously