so ive been messing with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and honestly im kind of at a crossroads. currently running a shack at my parents place about 90 miles out, got a decent antenna situation there (40m dipole, a vertical for 20 and up) and ive been using RCForb through RemoteHams to connect in. works okay most of the time but theres always this latency thing that bugs me when im trying to work CW, like even 150ms is enough to throw off my rhythm and i end up having to slow way down.

the SDR remote side of things is interesting to me — ive been reading about guys using SDRplay or an Airspy at the remote end feeding into SDR-Console or even just SDRuno over the internet and the receive quality is genuinely impressive compared to the compressed audio RCForb pushes through. but then you still need something for transmit which means youre running two separate systems basically.

anyone here actually done a hybrid setup like that? where you use an SDR for monitoring/receive and then have the actual rig controlled separately for TX? seems clunky but the RX audio quality difference is noticeable. or am i just overthinking this and should stick with what works even if the audio isnt pristine. also wondering if the RemoteHams server infrastructure is reliable enough for serious contesting or if people generally roll their own VPN + hamlib type setup for that

yeah the latency thing on CW is real and it doesnt really get better no matter how fast your connection is on both ends because theres just processing overhead baked into RCForb that you cant get around. i switched to a straight hamlib + flrig setup over a VPN tunnel about two years ago and honestly for CW it made a huge difference. still not perfect but controllable down to around 80ms round trip on a good day.

the hybrid SDR idea isnt as crazy as it sounds — i know a couple guys in the ARRL SDR working group type circles who do exactly that, airspy at the remote end running spyserver and they just monitor on that while using a separate control path for the actual rig. the receive audio really is that much better it kind of ruins you for the compressed stuff. downside is youre managing two software stacks and when something breaks at 0200 chasing a rare one you really dont want to be troubleshooting two separate systems remotely. for contesting specifically id probably not trust RemoteHams infrastructure, too many single points of failure you dont control. roll your own if youre serious about it

im maybe not the best person to answer the contesting part but i did set up something similar last year for a buddy who has a killer antenna farm on his property but lives in an HOA now. we ended up going with a raspberry pi running the whole shack remotely, rig control through hamlib, and just a regular audio over IP thing for TX monitoring. for RX he runs spyserver on a separate little box and just pulls that into SDR-Console on his end. its not elegant but it works and he said the first time he worked JA on 40m from his living room he nearly fell out of his chair.

the RemoteHams ecosystem is fine for casual stuff i think but yeah if you care about latency or audio fidelity youll probably end up wanting more control over your own stack eventually