so ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few weeks now trying to get my station accessible from work and honestly the audio latency is driving me crazy. im running the RCForb client on my laptop connecting back to my home shack which has a IC-7300 hooked up to a old windows 10 box. the control works fine, PTT fires, everything seems to sync up okay but theres like this noticeable delay that makes it almost impossible to work any kind of pile up or even have a normal QSO without stepping on people.

my upload at home is only around 15mbps which i thought would be fine but maybe not? and the work wifi is probably not helping either. i read somewhere that you can tweak the audio buffer settings in the server config but i cant find where that actually is in the interface. has anyone dealt with this and found a decent working combination of settings? also curious if anyone has compared this to running something like WebSDR or even just a straight VNC connection with WSJT-X in the background, wondering if thats more practical for just doing digital modes remotely.

the SDR side of things actually works pretty well for monitoring, its the transmit control part that feels janky

yeah the latency thing with RCForb is something you kind of just have to accept to a point. 15 up should be plenty, i run my remote on a 12mb connection without too many issues. the bigger culprit in my experience is usually jitter not raw bandwidth, especially on wifi at both ends. if you can hardwire at least the home server end you'll notice a difference pretty quick.

for the buffer settings open the server configuration and look under the audio tab, theres a slider for buffer size and i keep mine down around 100ms which helps a lot. going lower than that gets sketchy depending on how stable your connection is. also make sure you're not running any other heavy traffic on that home machine while you're connected, even background windows updates can mess things up more than you'd expect.

honestly for digital modes i just use a separate RDP session into the shack PC and run WSJT-X that way, the RemoteHams audio path adds complexity you dont really need for FT8 since you're not monitoring in real time anyway

I went down this rabbit hole last year. ended up switching to a raspberry pi running a dedicated remote server instead of the windows box and the latency got noticeably better, probably because theres less background garbage running. not saying windows is the problem necessarily but the pi just sits there and does nothing except handle the radio stuff so its more predictable i guess.

the WebSDR comparison is a bit apples to oranges though since that's receive only, if you want transmit you're kind of stuck with something like RCForb or maybe Hamlib + a custom setup if you're into that sort of thing. there's also that whole EchoLink / IRLP internet linking rabbit hole if you want to get into repeater stuff remotely but thats a totally different animal than what you're doing