so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my shack is at home but i travel a fair bit for work and been wanting to get on HF from hotels and stuff. been looking at RemoteHams and also the SDR remote stuff they have now but also considering just setting up my own thing with something like remoterig or even just VPN into a softrock or airspy at home.

the RemoteHams SDR remote looks interesting but honestly im not totally clear on how it integrates with like actual TX capability vs just being an SDR receiver. like is it purely RX or can you actually transmit through it if you have a full radio connected on the remote end? their docs are kind of confusing on that part.

also curious if anyone has experience using it for internet linking, i was thinking about whether i could tie this into my local 2m repeater somehow which might be a completely separate rabbit hole i guess. anyone done anything like that or am i mixing up two totally different things here

the RemoteHams platform does support full TX if the host station has it configured that way — the SDR remote part is more for stations that want to offer receive-only access or maybe they're running an SDR frontend like an RSP or similar and just want to share that. if the host has an actual transceiver connected and has enabled TX you can transmit, but obviously you need to be in control and have arrangements with the station owner or it's your own station.

the internet linking question is kind of a different beast. you're basically talking about something more like Echolink or AllStar territory there. RemoteHams isn't really designed for repeater linking, it's more point to point remote control of a specific station. if you wanna link your 2m repeater you'd want to look at AllStar or even just a cheap pi running app_rpt. i have both running and they really dont overlap much in how i use them.

yeah what he said about TX is right. i set up my ic-7300 on RemoteHams last year and once you get the audio latency dialed in its actually pretty usable. biggest issue i had was my upload speed at home was only like 5 meg and that caused some issues with the audio codec dropping out during contests but for casual operating its fine.

the SDR remote thing i messed around with briefly but tbh if youre gonna put in the effort to set something up remotely i'd just go full radio. the pure SDR receive stuff is cool for like monitoring or if you want people to be able to tune around without worrying about them keying up, but for actually getting on the air its not what you want. rolling your own with a VPN and remoterig is totally doable but RemoteHams honestly just handles a lot of the annoying stuff for you especially if your home IP changes or you're behind CG-NAT which is a whole other nightmare