so ive been messing around with trying to get a proper remote station going for the past few months and finally got something that sort of works but im not totally happy with the audio chain. the basic setup is a IC-7300 at the home QTH connected through RemoteHams RCForb server software, works fine for basic stuff, latency is acceptable on a good day maybe 150-200ms which i can live with for SSB and definitely for CW if youre not doing anything crazy fast.

the part im trying to figure out now is adding an SDR receiver alongside it — i have an RSPdx sitting there and i was thinking about using it for panadapter data streamed separately so i can see whats going on on the band while operating through the main rig. tried piping the SDR data through a separate VNC session just for the spectrum display but its kind of a mess bandwidth wise and the whole thing gets sluggish when both streams are running.

has anyone actually done something like this cleanly? i saw some stuff about using SDR-Console's network server feature but wasnt sure if that plays nicely alongside the RemoteHams stack or if its going to be fighting over the same audio device. also wondering if theres a smarter way to do the internet linking part — right now im just poking holes in the firewall which works but feels sloppy. considered putting it behind a VPN but then im adding another hop and the latency creeps up.

anyway if anyone has a similar setup id love to hear how you handled it especially the SDR side of things

yeah i did something pretty close to this about a year ago. ended up running SDR-Console server on the same machine as the RCForb server and honestly it was fine, they dont really fight over audio because the RSP series doesnt use a traditional audio device — its all USB native so there's no conflict there. the bandwidth is the bigger problem like you said, especially if you're streaming 24bit audio for the main rig AND trying to push a decent chunk of spectrum for the panadapter.

what i ended up doing was dropping the SDR stream resolution way down when i was actively transmitting, only really need the panadapter for monitoring so you dont need full resolution all the time. SDR-Console lets you set a pretty narrow bandwidth for the network stream so i just keep it at like 200kHz wide centered on whatever band im on, that dropped the bandwidth load considerably. VPN latency thing is real but if you use wireguard instead of openvpn its pretty minimal, i added maybe 20ms which wasnt worth losing sleep over for SSB work.

the firewall hole thing is fine honestly, lots of people do it, just make sure RCForb has a password on it obviously. i run my remote into a VPS as a jump host which sounds complicated but its basically just ssh tunneling, keeps the home IP out of it and i can revoke access without changing anything at the shack. probably overkill for most situations but i was paranoid about it.

never got the SDR panadapter working remotely in a way i was happy with, gave up and just use the 7300's built in scope streamed as part of the screen share which looks terrible but at least its one less thing to troubleshoot at 2am when something breaks