so ive been slowly building out a remote station at my parents house about 90 miles away, mostly because my HOA situation here is a disaster and im not fighting that battle anymore. been running a basic setup with a raspberry pi and some port forwarding for a while but i finally started looking at RemoteHams more seriously and also just discovered you can tie in an SDR for the panadapter side of things which honestly changes everything for me.

the question i keep running into is how people are handling the latency when youre trying to work any kind of digital mode or even just SSB when the internet link isnt super clean. my parents have decent cable but its not fiber and sometimes the upstream drops or gets wobbly. ive got a Icom 7300 out there and im wondering if running the built in USB audio through RemoteHams client is any better or worse than some of the other approaches ive seen people cobble together.

also someone mentioned using echolink or IRLP nodes as a fallback if the main control link goes down, like for monitoring purposes at least, but i couldnt quite follow how they had that wired up. anyone done something like that or is that kind of a frankenstein solution that isnt worth the trouble

yeah the latency thing with SSB over a flaky upstream is just kind of a fact of life unfortunately. ive been running a remote IC-7610 for about two years now and what helped me most was actually just setting the audio codec in RemoteHams to something lower bitrate and accepting slightly worse audio quality in exchange for way less jitter. the default settings they give you arent optimized for anything less than a pretty solid connection. also QoS on the router at the remote end makes a bigger difference than people think, prioritizing that outbound audio stream so it doesnt get stomped by whatever else is on the network.

the SDR panadapter piece — if youre on a 7300 you can actually just pipe the IQ data out the USB and run SDR# or HDSDR on the local PC and have that feed through a separate VNC session or something. its a little clunky but works fine. some guys run a dedicated RTL-SDR dongle at the remote end just for the pan instead of loading up the main rig connection, which actually makes sense when you think about it.

the echolink fallback idea isnt crazy but youre basically maintaining two totally separate systems at that point. i tried something similar with a cheap HT and a RaspberryPi running svxlink and it was more trouble than it was worth for me personally. but if your parents can occasionally go kick a router it might be overkill anyway

RemoteHams has worked pretty solid for me but I'll say the client software feels like it hasnt been updated in a while, at least on windows. nothing broken but it just has that early 2010s feel to it. still does the job though.

one thing nobody really talks about is watchdog timers and what happens if your control link just... dies mid-transmission. make sure youve got something at the remote end that will key down after X seconds of no keepalive, you really dont want to be that guy whos been transmitting dead carrier for 20 minutes because his connection dropped. the 7300 has some built in stuff for this but double check how RemoteHams handles it on their end too because i had a weird situation once where i thought it was covered and it wasnt quite.