so ive been messing around with setting up a remote station for a few months now and finally got something resembling a working setup. running a IC-7300 at the home QTH with RemoteHams client software and its mostly fine for SSB but i started thinking about whether i could integrate an SDR into the mix for panadapter stuff while operating remote. like have the SDR running at the shack and pipe that spectrum view back to wherever im sitting with the laptop.

the latency thing is killing me though. im on a decent connection at both ends, maybe 50ms round trip, and voice is usable but when i try to have the SDR waterfall updating at the same time it just gets choppy and sometimes the whole thing falls apart. wondering if anyone has actually solved this or if im just trying to do too much over one pipe.

also separately - has anyone linked a remote station into an Allstar or EchoLink node? i have a 2m radio at the site too and thought maybe i could tie that in somehow but i honestly dont know if thats redundant or actually useful. feels like it might be useful for emcomm stuff but im not fully sure where im going with that idea yet.

the SDR waterfall over RemoteHams is a known bandwidth hog, yeah. what i did was run a separate lower-res stream for the panadapter, like drop the FFT update rate way down and reduce the span. you dont need 10 fps on the waterfall when youre remote, 2-3 fps is honestly fine for finding signals. also make sure youre not running the SDR stream and audio on the same QoS priority or they'll fight each other. separating those helped me a lot.

as for the Allstar linking idea, i actually do something similar. have a node at my remote site tied to a 2m rig and it works great for monitoring local nets when im doing HF remotely. its not redundant at all if youre thinking emcomm - having that local VHF capability accessible remotely is actually pretty handy when things go sideways and you need to reach someone local fast. takes a bit of fiddling to get the audio levels right between the node and whatever youre doing on HF but its doable.

50ms is actually not bad at all for remote ops, ive worked stations on the other side of the planet with worse. the choppy thing might be a buffering issue on the audio side more than raw latency. whats your jitter looking like? sometimes a connection looks fine on average but the jitter spikes and thats what breaks everything up.

cant really help with the SDR part, i just run straight RemoteHams without all that extra stuff, works fine for contesting which is mostly what i care about. but curious how the linking idea develops if you go further with it.