so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, mostly using a raspberry pi and a cheap SDR dongle just to see what i could hear from my shack when im traveling for work. got it mostly working but the latency on transmit is killing me and im not sure if thats a RemoteHams thing or just my upstream bandwidth being garbage at the home end.

the setup right now is an rtl-sdr going into SDR++ on the remote machine, and then ive got RemoteHams client on my laptop here. the receive side is actually pretty decent, way better than i expected for 20m SSB. but every time i try to key up through the linked radio (an old FT-857 with a rigblaster interface) theres this noticeable delay before the PTT actually fires and by the time audio is going out im already half a syllable into whatever im saying.

ive seen people mention using EchoLink or IRLP for internet linking but that feels like overkill for what i want, which is basically just operating my own station remotely without involving a repeater system at all. anyone gone down this road and found a way to tighten up the whole chain? or is this just kind of a live-with-it situation when youre running this over a standard cable connection

yeah the PTT delay is pretty much the thing everybody runs into first with RemoteHams. what helped me was switching to a dedicated audio interface on the shack side instead of using the rigblaster for the audio path — kept the rigblaster just for PTT and CAT, ran the actual TX audio through a USB interface with lower latency drivers. also if your home router supports QoS you want to prioritize that UDP stream or it gets absolutely murdered when anything else on the network decides to do an update or whatever.

the SDR backend thing is interesting though, i havent tried mixing a pure SDR receive path with a conventional TX radio like that. curious how youre handling the frequency sync between what the SDR is tuned to and what the 857 is actually on — are you just doing it manually or is there some CAT loop keeping them matched

Echolink and IRLP are totally different animals, those are for linking repeaters and nodes together, not really what you want for a personal remote HF setup. Not knocking the idea but yeah that wouldnt solve your problem at all.

Ive been running a remote setup for about two years now, different software but same general idea, and honestly some amount of latency is just the reality of doing SSB over the internet. the guys who get it really tight are usually running dedicated fiber on both ends or they live close enough to their remote site that round trip time is under 30ms. if your home upload is like 10-15 Mbps cable you might be able to squeeze it down but probably not eliminate it. some people just switch to CW for remote work because timing matters less than it does on phone.