So ive been messing around with remote station control for a few months now and finally got a decent setup going with RemoteHams but im running into some weirdness that i cant quite figure out. The SDR side of things works pretty well most of the time — im using an RTL-SDR dongle on the remote end just to monitor the band while my main rig handles the actual TX, feeds through the RRC-1258 boxes. Works okay but every now and then the audio path just... drops. Not the whole connection, just the audio. PTT still keys the rig, i can see the ALC moving on the meter i have a webcam pointed at, but no receive audio comes back. Cycling the connection usually fixes it but thats obviously not ideal especially if im in the middle of a QSO or something.

Also been looking at integrating this with EchoLink or maybe IRLP for some internet linking stuff, not sure if thats overcomplicating things. Anyone run a hybrid setup where they do both real HF remote and also have VHF/UHF linking going on the same box? curious if there are resource conflicts or if the networking just gets messy. My upstream bandwidth isnt amazing, like 15 Mbps up at the remote site, should be enough but maybe thats part of the audio drop issue too? Idk. Running a Kenwood TS-590SG as the main rig if that matters.

The audio dropout thing with RRC boxes is pretty well documented and its almost always a buffer underrun or a UDP packet storm on the local network side rather than bandwidth on the WAN. 15 up should be plenty for the 590SG codec settings. What i would check first is whether you have QoS configured on your router at the remote site — if something else on that network decides to do a big transfer right when youre in a QSO it'll stomp on the RRC audio packets since UDP just gets dropped. I had the exact same symptom and setting up a simple traffic shaping rule to prioritize port 5060 and the RRC audio ports fixed it like 90% of the time. The other 10% turned out to be a flaky ethernet cable between the router and the RRC box, of all things.

On the EchoLink/HF hybrid question — yeah i run something similar. Separate machine handles the linking side, just a cheap mini PC running the EchoLink software and a little VHF radio. I kept it completely separate from the HF remote stack on purpose because when you start sharing audio devices and serial ports across multiple applications it becomes a nightmare to troubleshoot. If you have an old laptop sitting around just dedicate it to the VHF linking side and leave the RRC stuff alone on its own box.

Dont overthink the bandwidth thing, 15 up is way more than enough i run a remote on a 5Mbps connection at my cabin and it works fine except when the weather is bad and the DSL gets flaky. The SDR monitoring idea is interesting though, ive thought about doing the same thing for panadapter stuff. Which version of the RemoteHams client are you on? There was a bug a while back in one of the intermediate releases where the SDR feed and the main audio path would occasionally fight over something in the virtual audio cable routing and cause exactly the dropout you're describing. Might be worth checking if you're current.