so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a combination of RemoteHams RCForb client and a SDR as a panadapter on the back end and honestly its been... okay. not great. the latency on the audio path drives me nuts sometimes especially when trying to work weak signal stuff on 40m at night. like youll hear a station come up and by the time your PTT registers through the internet link the guy is already done with his transmission and moved on.

i was talking to a guy at our club who basically rolled his own setup using a Pi, a couple of audio-over-IP bridges, and some custom scripting for the CAT control and he swears its lower latency than RemoteHams but i honestly dont know if its apples to apples because his station is only about 15 miles from his house and mine is like 350 miles away colocated at my brother in laws place in rural Oklahoma so the WAN hop alone is going to add jitter no matter what i do.

anyone running RemoteHams with a proper SDR on the RF side? im using an SDRplay RSPdx right now as the pan but thinking about whether it makes more sense to just send raw IQ over the link instead of dealing with the audio codec. has anyone actually tried that over a decent broadband connection? curious what kind of bandwidth that actually chews through at like 1MHz sample rate or whatever.

yeah the latency thing is real and theres not a whole lot you can do about physics unfortunately. i ran a RemoteHams setup for a while at my parents place about 200 miles out and even with a decent fiber connection on both ends i was seeing like 80-120ms round trip on the control path which is just barely workable for casual HF but forget about anything competitive or fast-paced.

the raw IQ over the link idea is interesting but the bandwidth hits hard. at 2MHz sample rate with 16-bit samples youre looking at something like 64 megabits per second uncompressed which is obviously insane. people compress it down but then you get artifacts on weak signals which kind of defeats the purpose. theres some guys running remote SDR setups using SoapySDR with some compression on top and it can work but i think at that point youre basically reinventing what something like WebSDR or OpenWebRX already does. might be worth just setting up a proper OpenWebRX instance as your panadapter and keeping the audio path separate through RemoteHams, that way you can tune the SDR view independently from your actual transceiver. i did something similar with a KiwiSDR and it worked pretty well for monitoring while the rig was transmitting.

350 miles is tough, honestly for that kind of distance most of the remote linking stuff is gonna feel a bit sluggish no matter the software. i use EchoLink for some linking stuff and even that gets weird when everyones nodes are hopping through multiple servers. different use case i know but same basic problem with internet timing.

not super familiar with the RSPdx specifically but ive heard good things about it as a pan. does it play nice with the RCForb client or are you having to run it kind of parallel and switch windows? that context switching alone would annoy me during a pileup