so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and im at the point where i need to decide whether to just commit to RemoteHams or keep hacking together my own thing with a raspberry pi and some VoIP stuff. right now i've got a pretty basic setup — IC-7300 at the shack, a cheap ubiquiti router for the link back to the house, and im using a mix of rigctld and some custom scripts a buddy wrote for me. it works maybe 70% of the time which honestly isnt good enough when i want to jump on a pileup.

the RemoteHams SDR remote side of things is what im really curious about. ive read the docs and watched a couple videos but i cant quite tell if the audio latency is actually usable for SSB or if its more of a listen-only/CW kind of deal in practice. the website makes it sound great obviously but i want to hear from people actually running it day to day. also does anyone know how the internet linking side plays with something like AllStar or is that a totally different animal

been running a remoteHams setup for about two years, K3 out at a rural property about 40 miles from where i actually live. the latency thing on SSB is real but its manageable — i'd say anything under like 80ms round trip you can have a pretty normal QSO. above that it starts to feel weird, like youre talking to someone on a satellite phone. i had a period where my ISP at the remote end was doing something funky with traffic shaping and the audio would just fall apart, took me a while to figure out that was the issue and not the software.

the SDR remote piece is actually pretty solid if your upload bandwidth at the remote end can handle it. i run mine at 192kHz wide and it chews through maybe 2-3 Mbps which is fine on a decent connection but would be painful on anything marginal. the control latency for tuning and mode changes is snappier than youd think. as for AllStar thats really a separate world — different protocols, different purpose. you could theoretically bridge them but that seems like a pain and id question why you'd want to. what are you actually trying to do with the linking piece

your 70% reliability issue sounds like it might just be the ubiquiti config more than anything else, those things can be weirdly fussy about QoS settings especially if youre running audio and control data over the same link without any prioritization. i had similar issues and just bumping the control channel into a higher DSCP class helped a lot. RemoteHams does work but honestly if you already have rigctld running and youre close to a working setup, might be worth fixing what you have first before paying for another solution. just my 2 cents