so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for a few months now and got the basic remote station control working okay, can key up the rig from work and all that, but im trying to figure out if theres a clean way to tie in an SDR frontend so i can actually see the panadapter remotely instead of flying blind on the audio waterfall thing

my current setup is an IC-7300 at the home QTH, running the RemoteHams RRC-1258 client/server pair and that part is solid, latency is manageable on my home fiber but when i tried to also push the SDR IQ stream over the same link it got ugly fast, choppy audio and the waterfall was basically useless

what im wondering is whether anyone has actually gotten a panadapter or standalone SDR — like an RTL-SDR or an SDRplay — working alongside the RemoteHams link without killing the bandwidth budget. i read somewhere about using SDR-Console with a remote server instance but wasnt sure if that plays nice with the audio routing RemoteHams is already doing or if you end up fighting yourself with virtual audio cables everywhere

also semi-related but has anyone linked their remote station into a repeater or echolink node, sort of as a backup access method if the main RRC link goes down? feels like it could work but might be a nightmare to set up and keep stable

yeah the bandwidth thing bites everyone who tries this. the IQ stream from even a basic SDR is like 2-4 Mbps if you want decent bandwidth coverage and that just stomps on the RemoteHams audio path which really wants low latency more than raw throughput. what i ended up doing is running two completely separate connections — the RRC handles the rig control and codec audio on one QoS lane on my router, and the SDRplay RSP1A runs its own SDR-Console server instance on a different port. you can tell SDR-Console to compress the IQ or drop the sample rate way down and it becomes way more manageable, like sub-1 Mbps if you're okay with a narrower window on the panadapter

the virtual audio cable mess is real though, i wont lie. i use VB-Cable and just accept that it takes 20 minutes to figure out again every time Windows decides to rearrange my audio devices after an update. the routing is RRC audio goes into one VAC input, SDR-Console handles its own demod separately, you just use it as a visual reference not as your receive audio. once i accepted that it clicked

on the echolink thing — i tried that as a fallback once and honestly it introduced more variables than it solved. if your internet goes down at the shack the echolink node is down too so it doesn't really help unless you have a totally separate RF path back to the node

been running a remote ic-7610 for about two years and the built in scope stream from the radio itself is actually way better than trying to bolt an external SDR onto RemoteHams. if you have a radio with a built in panadapter and usb connectivity you can sometimes pull that scope data through a second tcp stream without the IQ overhead. dunno if the 7300 can do that the same way but worth checking

the echolink backup idea is interesting but in my experince when the primary link is flaky enough to need a backup, echolink isnt gonna be much more reliable anyway, theyre both hanging off your home internet. a VPN with automatic reconnect and maybe a cellular backup modem on the shack end is probably more worth the effort