so ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now and overall its pretty solid but i keep running into this one issue where the audio latency spikes randomly, like it'll be totally fine for 20 minutes then just jump to like 800ms out of nowhere and come back down. doesnt seem to matter what the band conditions are doing, happens on 40m just as much as 20m. my upload at the remote site is around 15 Mbps so it shouldnt be a bandwidth thing.

the remote station is running an IC-7300 and i've got the RemoteHams client software talking to it fine, PTT works, everything basically functions. but i wanted to also pipe in an SDR -- i have an RTL-SDR v3 sitting there -- so i could have a panadapter view while operating remotely. tried setting up SDR# on the remote machine and forwarding the stream but its kind of a mess, not sure if theres a cleaner way to do this.

also tangentially curious if anyone has tried using something like WSJT-X through a remote setup like this for FT8. i know the timing sensitivity is brutal for digital modes and im guessing the latency situation makes it basically unusable but maybe im wrong

the latency spikes you're describing sound like your ISP is doing some kind of traffic shaping or the QoS on your router at the remote end isn't set up right. i had almost the exact same thing with a remote station running through Comcast and it turned out the modem was doing some bufferbloat nonsense. running fq_codel on the router fixed it almost completely. worth checking with something like the DSLReports speed test that shows bufferbloat rating before you go too far down the SDR rabbit hole.

on the panadapter question -- the cleaner approach IMO is to not try to stream SDR# over the network at all. use something like rtl_tcp running on the remote machine and then connect to it from your end with SDR# or SDRConsole using the RTL-TCP source. the bandwidth needed is actually pretty reasonable for a narrow chunk of spectrum if you keep your sample rate down. i do something similar with a KiwiSDR at a friend's club station and it works better than youd expect.

FT8 through remote is doable but you have to be a little creative about it. what most people do is run WSJT-X on the remote machine itself rather than trying to do it from the client end -- that way the timing is local to where the radio is and the internet latency doesnt matter for the decode/transmit timing. you just need a way to kick off transmissions remotely which some people handle with scripts or just leaving a remote desktop session open alongside the RemoteHams client. its a bit clunky but i worked about 40 countries last winter doing exactly that on 17m so it definitely works. the audio latency thing i have no good answer for honestly, mine does it too sometimes and i never figured out why