so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a mix of stuff i cobbled together myself — hamlib over ssh tunnels, a cheap IP relay board for PTT, VNC for the logging software, the whole nine yards. it works but its honestly kind of a mess to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird the whole thing falls apart for a day or two until i figure out whats different.

i started looking at RemoteHams seriously last month because a friend of mine has been using it and says its pretty solid. he's got an SDR-based setup on the remote end which i thought was interesting because i was assuming it was just for conventional transceivers. i guess the SDR remote client handles that side of things? not totally clear on how the audio path works when you go that route vs using a radio with a built in soundcard interface.

my main hesitation is the whole internet linking piece — like if the RemoteHams server infrastructure has a hiccup does your whole station go dark, or is there some fallback. i know you can do direct connections but from what i read that requires both ends to have stable IPs which isnt always the case. anybody whos gone from DIY to RemoteHams or vice versa have thoughts? or even if youve just used both in different contexts id be curious what you found

yeah i ran a DIY setup for a long time, probably close to three years, before switching most of my stuff over to the RemoteHams ecosystem. the main thing i noticed is the audio latency handling is just better out of the box — my homebrew thing using mumble was okay but i was always tweaking jitter buffer settings and it still wasn't great on marginal connections. RemoteHams seems to have done more work on that side.

on the SDR remote question — the way i understand it when you're using an SDR on the host end the SDR remote software is basically doing the demodulation server side and sending compressed audio to the client, so the bandwidth requirements are actually lower than you might think. its not streaming raw IQ data across the link which is what i was afraid of at first. that said i havent run it with a pure SDR setup myself, my remote end is still an IC-7300 so take that for what its worth.

the server dependency thing is real. ive had maybe two or three outages in a year that i can attribute to their infrastructure and they were short but yeah it happened. for casual operating its totally fine, if youre doing something time critical like a scheduled net or a contest it could be annoying. direct IP connections do work around that but like you said you need a stable address on at least one end, i use a DDNS service on the radio end and it works fine most of the time.

the internet linking dependency bothered me too at first but honestly after running it for a while its not really different from depending on your ISP in general — if the pipe goes down youre down regardless. the RemoteHams servers have been more reliable for me than my home internet which says something i guess.

one thing nobody really talks about is the RF monitoring side when you go SDR remote. you can actually have a pretty wide panadapter view which is kind of nice for spotting activity before you tune in, feels more like sitting at a real station than the old way of just streaming a single frequency. prob not answering your exact question but its a thing i appreciate