so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, started with just a basic hamlib setup over SSH tunneled through a VPS which worked okay but had latency issues whenever the connection wasnt rock solid. a buddy of mine swore by RemoteHams and the RCForb client so i finally sat down and tried it out last weekend.

honestly the SDR remote side of things is what got me interested in the first place — i have an SDRplay RSPdx at the remote site and wanted to be able to pull a waterfall remotely without eating up a ton of bandwidth. RemoteHams handles it better than i expected, the compression is decent and you can tweak the FFT update rate to back off on the bandwidth if your link is marginal. compared to setting up OpenWebRX or whatever it actually just works out of the box which i wasnt expecting.

the internet linking piece is where i keep going back and forth though. i already have a node on AllStar at the remote site and bridging that into the remote control workflow feels clunky. has anyone actually gotten a smooth setup where the audio routing between the SDR frontend and the linked repeater node doesnt cause weird loop issues or latency stacking? im probably overcomplicating it but i cant figure out if the problem is in the RCForb audio chain or somewhere in how AllStar is grabbing the soundcard.

anyway curious if anyone has a similar setup or just said forget it and stuck with something simpler

yeah the audio loop thing is a real pain when you try to mix AllStar and RemoteHams on the same machine. i ran into the same thing, what ended up working for me was giving each application its own virtual audio device using something like VB-Cable or on linux just using separate ALSA loopback devices. the key is making sure RCForb isnt also trying to grab the default audio sink that ASL is already using. once i separated those two the latency stacking mostly went away, still adds maybe 200-300ms on top of the normal link delay but thats liveable.

on the SDR side i actually run the RSP in a separate process and pipe it into the RemoteHams server with a virtual COM port for CAT control, works surprisingly well. the bandwidth thing you mentioned is real though, if you drop the FFT update to like 5fps on a marginal link it becomes almost usable on a hotspot connection which i thought was kind of impressive honestly.

i just use RCForb for the audio and rig control and left AllStar completely out of it, trying to do both at once always felt like asking for trouble to me. my remote site is at a friend's QTH about 60 miles away and the latency over his cable connection is fine for SSB, CW is where you start to feel it if the jitter spikes. never really needed the repeater linking so maybe im not the right person to ask but honestly for just working HF remotely RemoteHams is pretty solid once you get past the initial registration stuff which was annoying