so ive been trying to sort out a proper remote station setup for maybe 3 months now and im kind of going in circles. my shack is at a rural property about 90 miles away from where i actually live most of the week and the plan was to just VPN in and run the rig directly but latency on the audio has been kind of brutal depending on the day.

a buddy suggested RemoteHams and i poked around on the site but honestly its a bit confusing whether im looking at the SDR remote piece or the full client-server thing they have going on. like are those two different products or is the SDR remote just a mode within the main platform? their docs are not exactly crystal clear on this.

separately ive been looking at internet linking just to have a backup path in case i want to get on from somewhere with spotty uplink — thinking maybe run Allstar on a node at the shack and link in when needed, i know its not the same as HF remote but for VHF/UHF work its probably fine. anyway the main question is whether anyone has actually sat down and compared RemoteHams against RCForb in terms of latency and how they handle marginal internet connections, because my upload at the shack is only like 5-6 Mbps on a good day.

yeah the SDR remote thing in RemoteHams is kind of its own deal — its specifically for running an SDR receiver remotely through their network, like you can connect to other peoples SDR nodes that are registered on the platform. the main RemoteHams client/server stuff is more for controlling an actual transceiver at a remote site, which sounds like what you actually want for your shack setup.

i ran RCForb for about a year with an IC-7300 before switching over and honestly both work but RCForb felt a little more straightforward to configure the audio routing, RemoteHams has more bells and whistles but i spent a weekend just getting the codec settings right. on a 5-6 Mbps uplink you should be totally fine with either one, audio is not that hungry, its more about jitter and ping consistency than raw bandwidth. if your rural connection has any packet loss though that will kill you regardless of which software you pick.

Allstar for the backup path is a solid idea, i do something similar at my place — HF remote is the main thing but i have a node running so i can at least check into local nets when the HF link is acting up. one thing to keep in mind is if youre on a network that does any kind of traffic shaping, the UDP that Allstar uses sometimes gets deprioritized and you get that garbled audio that sounds like youre talking through a blender. switching the node to use a different port helped me somewhat but it depends on the ISP.

havent used RemoteHams specifically so cant help you there but 90 miles is not a bad remote situation, some guys are running links much longer than that with decent results. whats your shack router situation, are you running any QoS on the upload side?