so ive been trying to get my remote station dialed in for the past few weeks and im hitting a wall with the audio latency. the setup is a IC-7300 at the home QTH, running RCForb server on an old i5 box, everything connects fine through RemoteHams and i can key up and receive no problem but the round trip audio delay is somewhere around 400-500ms which makes SSB basically unusable, like im talking over myself constantly.

ive tried messing with the buffer settings in RCForb and dropped the codec bitrate down to see if that helped but honestly i cant tell if its making things worse or better at this point. the internet connection at the remote end is a 50/10 cable modem and my end at the operating location is fiber so i dont think the bandwidth is the issue, more likely just jitter or something in the routing.

also separately - has anyone tried bridging RemoteHams into like an Allstar or IRLP node? im kind of half thinking about linking the remote station into the local repeater network so club members could use it but i have no idea if thats even a sane idea or if the latency just stacks up and becomes a total mess. curious if anyones done something like that.

the 400-500ms thing is pretty typical if you havent pinned down where the bottleneck actually is. first thing id do is run a continuous ping from the operating location to the remote box and watch the jitter, not just the average latency. if youre seeing spikes even occasionally that'll wreck the audio regardless of buffer settings. cable modems can be really bad for this especially if there's any upload congestion on that 50/10 line even briefly.

on the RCForb side there's a setting for audio compression mode, if youre on opus try bumping the frame size down to 10ms and see if that tightens things up. i was running similar latency on my remote 7610 setup and getting it under 200ms made SSB actually workable though i wont pretend it ever feels totally natural.

the Allstar idea is... interesting but yeah the latency stacking is real. ive seen guys do it but you basically end up with a node that has this weird lag that confuses everyone on the repeater. not impossible just annoying to manage.

had a similar thing going on with my remote setup last year, turned out the router at the remote QTH was doing something weird with QoS and basically throttling UDP packets intermittently. swapped it out for a plain dumb switch on that leg and the jitter dropped a lot. probably not your issue but worth checking if theres any consumer router in the path that might be doing traffic shaping you dont know about.

cant really help on the Allstar linking stuff, never gone down that road myself.