so ive been messing around with remote station control for a few months now and finally got a semi-stable setup going but im running into some weirdness with the SDR side of things. Background: I have an IC-7300 at the home QTH, running RCForb server on a windows box there, and im accessing it from my apartment about 40 miles away. The rig control part works fine, PTT works, audio in both directions is acceptable. The problem is ive been trying to layer in an SDR — specifically an RTL-SDR dongle connected to a small discone at the remote end — so i can get a wideband panadapter view while operating. RemoteHams supposedly supports this workflow but i cannot for the life of me get the SDR stream to stay stable. It connects, shows the spectrum for maybe 30-45 seconds, then just dies. Audio keeps going fine, rig control keeps going fine, just the SDR feed drops.

My internet at the remote end is about 25 down / 5 up which i know isnt great for the uplink. The SDR bandwidth is set to 2.048 MHz sample rate which should be around 4 Mbps of raw data compressed... or at least thats what im assuming. Could easily be wrong about that math. Anyone dealt with this? is there a buffer setting somewhere im missing or is this just a known flaky thing with the RTL over RemoteHams?

yeah the RTL streaming over remotehams is kinda finicky in my experience. 5 Mbps uplink is probably your bottleneck — the RTL at 2.048 Ms/s is pushing more data than people think, especially uncompressed. Try dropping to 1.024 Ms/s and see if the drops stop. You lose some spectrum width but the stream becomes way more manageable on a marginal connection. Also make sure youre not running any other traffic on that uplink at the same time, even a background windows update will murder it.

The other thing i ran into was a UDP buffer overflow on the server side that wasnt obviously logged anywhere. Ended up just being that the dongle was producing data faster than the network could handle bursts and the buffer was just silently dropping packets and eventually the client gave up. Lowering sample rate fixed it for me.

Bit of a tangent but have you considered just skipping the RTL entirely and using the 7300's built-in spectrum scope streamed via the audio/control interface? I know it's not as wide a view but it's one less thing to troubleshoot. I run a remote IC-705 and honestly gave up on SDR panadapter stuff over internet links because the latency mismatch between the rig audio and the spectrum display drove me nuts. By the time the spectrum shows a signal the audio is already halfway through it.

If you really want the wide panadapter view, some guys are using SDR-over-network locally at the remote site and just running WebSDR or SDR++ with a local network stream, then VNC-ing into a box there for the display. Adds complexity but the SDR traffic never has to traverse your internet link which eliminates the bandwidth problem entirely. Just something to think about.