so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my main station is at my parents place about 90 miles out, got a decent antenna farm out there but i live in an apartment so obviously i cant put anything up here. been running the station remotely for maybe 8 months now using a pretty cobbled together setup — basically just RDP into a windows box, run the rig through a SignaLink and some audio routing software, works okay but the latency is honestly pretty rough sometimes and PTT timing is all over the place depending on the day.

a buddy of mine keeps telling me to look at RemoteHams and just use their client, says it handles the audio buffering way better and the PTT latency is more predictable. i poked around their site a bit and the RCForb software looks decent but im not sure i want to go full public node — i just want to control my own rig from my apartment, dont really care about sharing it with strangers. does the server software work fine for private use? or is it basically designed around the public network?

also saw some stuff about people using SDR receivers on the remote end for a panadapter view, which honestly sounds really useful. anybody done that alongside a physical rig, like running an RTL-SDR or something on the remote end and feeding that into the client too? curious how much bandwidth that chews up because my parents place is only on like a 25/5 DSL connection.

yeah the RemoteHams server software works totally fine for private use, you just dont list yourself on the public directory and nobody can find you. been running it that way for probably three years now with an IC-7300 and it's genuinely night and day compared to the RDP audio hack approach. the client handles jitter buffering in a way that actually makes sense for voice, you can tune the buffer size vs latency tradeoff yourself which helps a lot when the connection is being flaky.

PTT-wise i find it pretty solid for SSB, like i rarely have the clipped first syllable problem that killed me with the old setup. CW through it is another story if you want to actually key it remotely, i gave up on that and just use a keyer macro approach. on the SDR side i do run an RTL-SDR dongle on the same machine and use a separate SDR# or SDRuno instance that i remote in for just to see the band, but i havent actually integrated it into the RemoteHams client itself — not sure if thats even a supported thing or if people just do it as a parallel thing. bandwidth on 25/5 should be fine for just the audio control channel, thats pretty lightweight. the SDR stream if you tried to pipe that remotely would be the killer, you'd want to run the SDR processing locally at the remote end and just send decoded audio back or something.

the latency thing on your current setup is probably mostly the audio stack honestly, RDP audio is just not designed for that use case at all. i went through the same thing before i found out about the proper remote rig software options. one thing i'll mention — there's also the W4MQ internet linking approach some guys use, kind of older but some people swear by it for specific rigs. but RemoteHams is probably the more actively maintained thing these days.

25/5 DSL should be workable but upstream is going to be your pain point when youre transmitting and sending audio back simultaneously, just something to keep an eye on if you notice dropouts specifically when you key up.