so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now and i finally got a decent setup running at my parents place since i cant have antennas here at the apartment. been using RemoteHams for the client software and honestly its not bad, the audio latency is manageable on a decent connection but i keep wondering if theres a smarter way to handle the SDR side of things

right now im running an IC-7300 over there and the RemoteHams RRC-1258 boxes handle the control link, which works fine for voice and basic digital but i started thinking — what if i added an SDRplay or something similar at the remote end and piped that back separately for a wideband panadapter view while the rig is doing its thing. has anyone tried running a parallel SDR stream alongside the RRC link without the two interfering with each other or eating up all the bandwidth

the internet at that location is only like 15-20Mbps up so i have to be realistic about what i can pull back. also im vaguely interested in the internet linking angle, like could i tie this into an Allstar node somehow or is that a completely different rabbit hole. probably overthinking it but figured id ask before i go buying hardware i dont need

yeah i ran almost exactly this setup for about a year, IC-7610 at the remote end with an RSP1A hanging off the same machine via USB. the SDR stream back to me was the bigger bandwidth hog than the rig control honestly, i was pushing SDRuno at like 2MHz span and it was eating maybe 8-10Mbps on its own depending on compression settings. so on a 15Mbps uplink you'd be cutting it close if you want any headroom for the actual audio

what i ended up doing was running the SDR panadapter locally only — meaning a small headless PC at the remote site just serves the panadapter through a browser via OpenWebRX, and i pull that up in a second window while the RRC handles the rig. works pretty well and the bandwidth for OpenWebRX is way more forgiving than trying to stream raw IQ. latency on the panadapter doesnt really matter since youre just looking at it

the Allstar thing is a whole separate deal, dont mix those two projects up in your head or youll confuse yourself. Allstar is really for linking repeaters and nodes together, not for remote HF control. you could technically run both on the same machine but theyre solving different problems

OpenWebRX is the move like the other guy said. i tried piping raw IQ back over the WAN once and it was a disaster on anything less than fiber, the buffer underruns were constant. the browser-based approach is just more practical for most home connections

one thing to watch out for with the RRC-1258 boxes and a separate SDR running on the same remote PC — make sure your USB power situation is solid over there. ive had RSPs do weird things when sharing a USB hub with other stuff, had one that would just drop off randomly and i spent like two weekends thinking it was a software issue before i realized it was just a crappy hub losing power under load. dumb problem but it'll drive you crazy