so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a combination of hamlib, a raspberry pi, and some custom scripts to control my IC-7300 over the internet. works fine most of the time but its a constant maintenance headache and every time my ISP does something weird i lose the connection and have to physically go out to the site to reset stuff.

been looking at RemoteHams and also the SDR remote stuff they have, and honestly im torn. like part of me wants a more polished solution that just works, but i also dont love the idea of depending on a third party service or having latency issues through their relay servers. my site is about 40 miles from my house and ive got decent upload speed there, around 15mbps, so direct connection is usually fine when it works.

anyone here actually used RemoteHams for a while and can tell me if its worth switching? specifically curious about the audio latency and whether the SDR remote side of things is actually usable for weak signal stuff or if its just kind of a toy. also does anyone know if you can link it into echolink or some other internet linking setup, ive got a 2m repeater at the same site and was thinking about tying it all together somehow.

ran RemoteHams for probably 18 months on a Kenwood TS-590 at a site about 60 miles out. the relay server thing bugged me too at first but honestly for voice modes the latency was totally acceptable, i want to say somewhere around 150-200ms end to end on a good day, which is workable for SSB once you get used to keying a half beat early. CW was trickier, i wouldnt want to do a serious contest through it but ragchewing was fine.

the SDR remote piece is a different story though — i had mixed results. it depends a lot on your bandwidth at the remote end and honestly how many other people are hammering their servers at the same time. for casual monitoring it was fine but trying to pull weak JT65 signals through it was frustrating, i ended up just keeping my WSJT-X setup on the pi anyway for digital modes. the integration with echolink type stuff i never tried directly but i know guys who run IRLP nodes alongside their RemoteHams setup, its not like officially supported or anything but its just two separate services on the same machine so no reason it wouldnt work.

yeah the maintenance thing is real, i gave up on my homebrew setup after about a year because i got tired of driving out there every time something dumb happened. switched to a commercial remote solution and while its not perfect at least i dont lose a weekend to it anymore. cant speak to RemoteHams specifically but the general principle is the same — you trade control and flexibility for convenience, and depending on your situation that might be the right call. 40 miles is far enough that your time has value.