so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i think i finally have a decent handle on it but the SDR side of things is still driving me a little nuts. my main rig at the remote site is an IC-7300 hooked up through RCForb server and that part works fine, latency is manageable even on my mediocre upload speed at that location, maybe 4-5 mbps up which isnt great but workable for SSB.

the part i cant quite nail is integrating an SDR panadapter view for the remote clients. ive got an RTL-SDR dongle attached to a spare tap off the antenna feedline and i was trying to get that data streaming alongside the audio. some guys on the RemoteHams network seem to have this running smooth but whenever i ask they give kind of vague answers about it, like yeah it just works which isnt super helpful.

also tangentially related — has anyone tied this kind of setup into any internet linking stuff like linking it to an echolink node or ILINK so local club members could at least listen in on what the remote is doing even if they cant transmit? i know thats kind of a weird hybrid use case but the club has been asking about it and im not sure if its even practical or just a bad idea architecturally. any thoughts appreciated, been at this a while and feel like im close but missing something obvious

the SDR panadapter thing over RCForb is doable but its not super clean in my experience. what most people end up doing is running SDR# or SDRuno locally at the remote site and then using something like SpyServer to stream the IQ data separately from the RCForb audio path. so you end up with two connections going — one for rig control and audio through RCForb, one for the IQ stream through SpyServer on a different port. bandwidth adds up fast though, even a decimated IQ stream at like 1.2 MSPS is gonna eat a couple meg depending on compression. on 4-5 up youre probably okay if nothing else is hammering the connection.

the echolink idea for club monitoring is honestly kind of a frankensteins monster situation. i mean it could work, you could feed audio out of the RCForb client into an echolink node running on a local machine, but youre stacking latency on latency and the echolink codec isnt gonna sound great after already being compressed once for the remote link. if the club just wants to listen maybe just set up a web audio stream with something like icecast, simpler and doesnt require eveyrone to have echolink configured. just my two cents

yeah the vague answers thing is real, ive noticed that too on the RemoteHams forums. i think some of those guys have been running their setups so long they genuinely dont remember what steps they took to get there lol.

i dont have the SDR integration sorted on mine either so cant help much there but on the internet linking question — we actually tried something similar for field day a couple years back where we wanted people at the club site to be able to hear what the remote op was working. ended up just doing a simple audio loopback through a cheap computer at the remote site feeding a local allstar node. wasnt elegant but it worked. the one thing id say is dont let it go two-way unless you really think through the RF exposure and transmit authorization situation at the remote end, got complicated fast when someone at the club end accidentally keyed up thinking they were just monitoring