so ive been trying to get a proper remote station going for about 6 months now and im finally at a point where the hardware side is mostly sorted but the audio latency through RemoteHams is driving me nuts on SSB. im running an IC-7300 at the home QTH with a RCForb server setup, decent upload speed on the ISP end, like 35mbps up, and the control side is on a fiber connection. the latency isnt terrible, maybe 250ms or so, but on phone it just feels really clunky. like by the time i hear the other station come back to me ive already stepped on them twice.

the SDR remote side of things actually works better for just listening around honestly. ive got an RTL-SDR dongle hooked into the same antenna feedline through a splitter and running that through the RemoteHams SDR interface and for just monitoring the band or checking propagation before i commit to actually operating, its pretty slick. lower overhead i guess since youre not pushing audio both ways.

anyone running a full duplex remote on HF with acceptable latency? wondering if switching to something like hamradiodeluxe remote or even just a straight VPN + RDP approach would help. i know some guys do the internet linking thing through EchoLink or AllStar as kind of a workaround for certain modes but thats a different animal really.

250ms is actually not that bad depending on how you look at it but yeah on SSB it adds up fast especially in a pile-up situation. ive done remote ops for a few years now and honestly the codec choice inside RCForb makes a huge difference. are you running opus or one of the older codecs? opus at even a fairly low bitrate tends to have less buffering artifacts than some of the others and you can tune the buffer size down pretty aggressively if your connection is stable.

the other thing that helped me was just... accepting that remote SSB phone ops is kind of a different headspace. you learn to pause a little longer than you normally would before transmitting. sounds dumb but it actually works. the SDR-as-monitor idea is solid though, i do something similar with a KiwiSDR i have on the same antenna line so i can spot check the actual transmitted signal from the remote end too, which is handy.

yeah the latency thing on phone is just kind of the reality of remote HF unless you throw serious money at low-latency server infrastructure which most of us arent gonna do. i mostly stick to CW and digital modes remote because of this exact issue. FT8 is almost made for remote ops honestly, the software handles the timing and you just watch it do its thing. tried running a net remotely once via phone and it was a mess, kept doubling with people.