so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now and cant quite decide how i want to set up remote access to my station. right now i have an IC-7300 at the home QTH and im about 40 miles away at a rental place during the week for work. the internet at both ends is decent, maybe 50 down at home and 100 at the rental.

i was messing around with RemoteHams for a bit and honestly the client software is a little clunky but it does work, and the SDR remote side of things is kind of interesting because i can at least hear what the band sounds like before committing to actually keying anything up. but i keep wondering if just setting up something with a raspberry pi and maybe floodgate or a VPN back to the shack would give me more control. a buddy of mine does internet linking through AllStar for the local repeater stuff but thats a different animal obviously.

anyone gone through this decision recently? curious especially about audio latency on SSB, thats been my biggest frustration so far when the propagation is decent and im trying to actually work someone rather than just listen around.

i went through almost exactly this same thing last year. tried RemoteHams first because it was the quickest to get going and yeah the interface is not winning any awards but the actual RF control is solid enough once you tweak the audio codec settings. the SDR preview feature saved me a bunch of times when i would have just been calling into dead air.

eventually i moved over to a pi-based setup using a combination of hamlib for rig control and just a plain mumble server for audio and honestly the latency is way better, like night and day on SSB. had to do some port forwarding and set up a wireguard VPN but once it was running its been rock solid for months. the tradeoff is obviously setup time and you need to actually be comfortable messing with linux config files. if you just want something that works out of the box in an afternoon RemoteHams is probably still the answer.

AllStar is a totally different thing like you said, thats more for linking repeaters into the node network, though some people do use it creatively for HF gateway stuff but i wouldnt go that route for what youre describing.

latency on SSB is just kind of a fact of life with any of these remote setups tbh. even with really good internet on both ends youre probably looking at a couple hundred ms round trip and you just have to get used to it. i run a remote setup to my tower about 60 miles out and after a while your brain adjusts and you stop noticing as much. DX contacts are actually not that bad because the other station usually has some delay in their response anyway.

one thing i will say about the SDR remote side of RemoteHams is that having that panadapter view remotely is genuinely useful, its not just a gimmick. spotted something on 17m last week i would have scrolled past otherwise.