so ive been running a remote station at my parents place about 90 miles away for a couple years now, started with just a raspberry pi running fldigi and some VPN stuff that was honestly a huge pain to maintain every time the router rebooted or the pi decided to have a moment. works ok but latency on the audio has always been kinda rough and any time there's a network hiccup the whole thing falls apart and i have to call my dad to go push buttons which he finds hilarious but i dont

anyway i was looking at RemoteHams and their SDR remote client — the RCForb software — and wondering if anyone's actually using it for serious operating or if its mostly just casual listening type stuff. i know it supports a bunch of radios through the server software but the SDR piece is what caught my eye because i was thinking about putting a RSP1A or maybe an Airspy up there as kind of a wideband monitor while also having the IC-7300 for actual TX. the internet linking side of things is what im not totally clear on, like does it handle the audio sync better than what i get with a raw VNC + audio stream approach?

i've seen some youtube demos but those are always cherry picked ideal conditions obviously. curious what real world experience looks like, especially on a residential cable connection on the remote end

been using RCForb for about 18 months with an IC-7610 and honestly the audio handling is noticeably better than when i was doing the manual stream thing. it does its own buffering and you can tune it per connection which makes a big difference on variable latency links. the SDR piece i havent used much because i already have a panadapter sorted but the architecture is there and i've seen guys on the RemoteHams groups using SDRplay hardware pretty cleanly through it

the main thing that'll bite you on a residential cable connection on the remote end is upload bandwidth during TX — not so much the control latency but if youre trying to also stream back a wideband SDR view at the same time as running the rig audio that adds up fast. i throttle my SDR bandwidth way down when im on SSB and it mostly works. the internet linking stuff in terms of the server talking to the client is pretty solid, its really just your pipe that matters. id say try the free tier on a spare machine before committing to anything

yeah the calling your dad thing is real, i went through that phase too lol. one thing i'd add is that if you're seriously considering this kind of setup you really want a proper remote power cycle on that end, something like a WiReach or an IP-PDU because no matter how good the software is something will eventually hang and you need a way to cold boot everything without a site visit. learned that one the hard way after a windows update decided to restart the remote PC at 2am and just... sat at a login screen for three days before i noticed