so ive been messing around with remote station control for about six months now and finally got a decent setup going with a K3 at my parents place out in the country (way better noise floor than my suburban QTH) and im linking it back to my home PC using RemoteHams. works pretty well most of the time but im starting to wonder if the SDR remote side of things is worth digging into more.

right now im just using the standard RRC-1258 microbit pair and it's fine for voice but when i try to do any digital modes the latency kind of kills me. not terrible but enough that fldigi gets a little weird sometimes. someone mentioned the SDR remote feature basically streams the raw IQ data back which would theoretically be a lot more flexible for digital work. anyone actually done this? feels like it could be a rabbit hole.

also curious if anyone is using the internet linking side for things like echolink or IRLP integration with their remote setup. seems like you could tie a lot of this together but the documentation on RemoteHams is honestly not great and their forum feels kind of dead.

yeah the IQ streaming approach is definitely more flexible once you get it dialed in. i ran a similar setup for about a year with an IC-7300 and feeding the IQ back over the internet let me run WSJT-X locally which was huge for FT8. latency is basically a non issue for that mode anyway so it worked great. the tricky part is your upload bandwidth at the remote end — you need pretty consistent throughput or the SDR client starts dropping samples and you get decode failures. i was running about 3-4 Mbps upstream just for the IQ stream at a modest sample rate, so make sure whatever connection is at your parents place can handle that plus the control traffic.

the RemoteHams SDR client itself is a bit clunky honestly. its not wideband like WebSDR or anything, its more like a remote head replacement that happens to pass IQ, so dont go in expecting something that feels like SDRuno. but for the functional stuff it gets the job done.

ive been doing the echolink + remote HF thing for a while, different software stack than you though. i use a raspberry pi at the remote site running both the RRC stuff and a separate echolink node and they basically just coexist on the same internet connection. never really tried to integrate them in any deep way, just kind of run parallel. RemoteHams has some hooks for linking i think but i never went down that path. if you figure out something clever there let us know, there might be some interesting stuff you could do for emcomm applications where you want VHF linking and HF capability from one remote site.