so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and im at that point where i have to decide whether to just commit to RemoteHams or keep trying to glue together my own solution with a raspberry pi, some port forwarding, and whatever else i can throw at it

my current setup is a ft-991a at the home QTH connected through a basic VPN, works okay for SSB but the audio latency is all over the place and forget about CW, its basically unusable past maybe 20wpm because of the delay. i saw someone at the club using RemoteHams with their SDR setup and it looked really smooth, like noticeably smoother than what i have going on

the SDR remote side of it is what actually interests me more though — the idea of being able to tune around with a wideband SDR from anywhere, use it as a panadapter remotely, that kind of thing. does anyone have real world experience with RemoteHams using the SDR interface specifically? and how does it handle when your internet connection at the remote end isnt great, like say youre on hotel wifi or a phone hotspot

also curious if anyone has tried linking this stuff into any VOIP or internet linking setups, like i know some guys run echolink nodes and wires-x and i wonder if theres any crossover there or if thats just a totally different world

ran RemoteHams for about two years with an IC-7300 and a rtl-sdr dongle as a secondary SDR at the shack. the SDR integration is actually pretty decent once you get the client configured right, main thing is you want to make sure your upstream bandwidth at the host end is solid because the SDR stream chews through more than you'd expect, especially if you set the bandwidth wide

hotel wifi is hit or miss honestly. ive done sessions from hotels that worked great and others where the audio was choppy enough i just gave up. the software does have adaptive bitrate stuff but theres a floor below which it just falls apart. phone hotspot is usually more consistent in my experience because the latency is more predictable even if the bandwidth is lower

the echolink/internet linking crossover question is sort of apples and oranges — those systems are designed to extend the RF side, you're basically connecting to a repeater or node that then goes over RF again. RemoteHams is more like you're sitting at the radio remotely, the RF part is still at your home QTH. some people do run both but theyre solving different problems

yeah the CW latency thing is real and its the reason i never got my home rolled setup working for anything serious. switched to RemoteHams maybe a year ago and the CW mode is actually usable now, i think they do some local keying compensation on the host side but im not 100% sure how it works under the hood

one thing nobody mentions is the audio codec settings matter a lot more than people think. default settings arent always optimal, spent like a weekend just tweaking that stuff before i got something i was happy with on SSB