so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my antenna situation at home is basically a disaster — HOA, tiny lot, neighbors who think a dipole is some kind of surveillance equipment — so ive been looking seriously at remote operation. a buddy of mine has a remote station up at his cabin about 80 miles away and hes been bugging me to try RemoteHams to access it.

i messed around with the RemoteHams client software for maybe an hour last weekend and honestly it wasnt as bad as i expected but i couldnt get the audio latency down to where it felt comfortable on SSB. were talking maybe 400-500ms which is just awkward if somebodys trying to work you and youre sitting there waiting to hear if they came back. CW wasnt terrible though, which makes sense i guess. he also has an SDR running alongside the IC-7300 so you get the panadapter through the RemoteHams SDR interface and that part actually worked pretty slick — being able to see the band and click to tune is way more intuitive than i expected for a remote setup.

the internet linking piece is where i keep getting confused though. like is he running that through the RemoteHams server infrastructure or is there a way to do a direct peer connection to cut down the latency? ive read conflicting stuff on this. some posts say you can do direct but then youre dealing with port forwarding and dynamic DNS and all that and i dont know if its worth it vs just living with the relay latency.

anyone actually running one of these setups day to day for like real HF operating not just poking around occasionally? curious if the latency ever stops feeling weird or if you just adapt to it.

yeah the latency thing is real and it never fully goes away but you do adapt, at least i did. im running a remote setup thats been going about two years now, not RemoteHams specifically — i built mine around a Raspberry Pi with hamlib and a separate audio stream, kind of janky but it works. the trick for me was getting a wired ethernet connection on both ends, wifi on either side makes it noticeably worse. also QoS on the router to prioritize the audio packets, that helped a lot more than i expected.

on the RemoteHams direct vs relay question, i believe you can request a direct connection if both ends support it but youre right that it depends on the NAT situation at the remote end. if hes behind a typical ISP router it might fall back to relay anyway. the SDR integration is genuinely one of the nicer parts of that software though, being able to see whats happening on the band without waiting for the rig to sweep is underrated for remote use. for SSB DX its still awkward but for contests where youre search and pounce it actually kind of works once you get used to the rhythm of it.

400-500ms is rough for phone, not gonna lie. i tried RemoteHams for about a month last year and ended up just going back to RDP into a windows box at the remote site with a local SDR doing the audio — way more latency theoretically but somehow felt more predictable if that makes sense. RemoteHams has gotten better apparently but i havent gone back to test it recently.

one thing worth mentioning — if your buddy has that IC-7300 connected, the CI-V control through RemoteHams can occasionally get weird when band conditions change fast and the software is trying to update the panadapter and control the rig at the same time. seen it cause the rig to drop out of remote mode like twice in a contest which was annoying. might be his setup specifically but worth knowing about before you invest a lot of time into it.