so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a fairly decent station at my QTH — IC-7300, a tribander at 40ft, and an 80m dipole — and i want to be able to run it from work or when im travelling. currently i have a VPN into the shack and i was using a combination of TeamViewer for the desktop and some sketchy audio-over-IP thing i cobbled together, and it kind of works but the latency is brutal and CW is basically unusable above about 18wpm which is frustrating.

ive been looking at RemoteHams and also the SDR remote stuff they have going. from what i can tell the RCForb client does some pretty clever stuff with the audio buffering to smooth out jitter, but im curious how it actually performs in practice over a residential cable connection on both ends. my shack side has about 30mbps upload which should be plenty.

the other thing im wondering about is how people handle the internet linking side when you want to tie in something like a local repeater feed or run some kind of roundtable. ive seen people mention AllStar nodes and IRLP in the same breath as remote HF control and im not totally sure how those pieces fit together or if people are even doing that.

anyway if anyones run RemoteHams for more than a few weeks id love to hear how it actually holds up day to day, especially on HF SSB and CW. the marketing stuff on their site is pretty vague about real world performance.

ran RCForb for about two years with a 7610 on the remote end, the latency thing is real but honestly it depends a lot more on routing than raw bandwidth. i had a stretch where my shack ISP was doing something weird with traffic shaping and CW was garbage, then they stopped and suddenly 25wpm was fine. so before you blame the software id check if your upstream provider is doing anything funny with UDP packets.

the SDR remote side of RemoteHams is a different beast, thats more like you're streaming the raw IQ from a SDR receiver hosted somewhere, which is cool for listening but it wont let you TX obviously. people sometimes get confused between the two modes the platform offers. if you want full transceiver control with TX you want the regular RCForb client pointed at your own station, not the SDR network side.

as for mixing in AllStar or IRLP — i dont think RemoteHams itself does anything with that natively. those are separate systems. ive seen guys run an AllStar node on the same raspberry pi thats doing their remote shack stuff but theyre basically parallel setups that just happen to be in the same box. they dont really talk to each other unless you do some custom audio routing which gets complicated fast.

yeah the audio buffering in RCForb is actually pretty good once you tune the settings, theres a buffer size slider and most people leave it at default which is way too aggressive for a low latency connection. if you have a solid connection try dropping it down and see if CW tightens up. made a big difference for me.

one thing nobody mentions is the PTT delay, even best case youre looking at maybe 80-100ms round trip if everyones on a decent connection, which on SSB you barely notice but on CW it does feel slightly off until you get used to it. i just run a slightly slower speed now when remote vs in the shack, not a huge deal.