so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now, got the whole thing set up at my brother in laws place about 60 miles away since he has a decent lot and i can run a 40m dipole and a vertical out there without the HOA nonsense i deal with at home. been using RemoteHams for the client side and it's been mostly fine but lately i keep getting these dropouts that last anywhere from 2 to maybe 10 seconds and then it reconnects. not a total disconnect, more like the audio just freezes and then comes back. PTT sometimes stays keyed during the freeze which is embarrassing when youre in the middle of a pileup.

the internet at the remote end is a cable connection, like 150 down and about 20 up, should be more than enough. i ran a ping test during one of the dropouts and the latency spiked to like 800ms for a few seconds then came back to normal 15ms. so something is happening upstream of me. local ISP maybe. ive tried the SDR side of things too, been messing with the SDR-Console remote access stuff as a backup and that seems a bit more resilient but i lose some of the rig control features i actually need.

anyone running a stable long term remote setup that's had this kind of intermittent issue? wondering if a VPN tunnel would help smooth things out or if thats just adding more potential failure points

yeah the PTT staying keyed thing is a known annoyance with remotehams, there's a watchdog timer setting somewhere in the server config that should release PTT if it loses heartbeat for more than a couple seconds, worth digging into if you havent already. i think its under the advanced tab in the server settings but dont quote me on that, been a while since i poked around in there.

the ping spikes sound like a bufferbloat problem at the remote site. even with a fast connection if the router queue isnt managed well you can get those bursts. try running the dslreports speed test with the bufferbloat test and see what grade it gets. if its C or below thats probably your culprit. replacing the router or flashing it with openwrt and setting up fq_codel fixed mine completely, went from random 500ms spikes to rock solid sub 20ms all the time. the VPN idea isnt crazy but i agree its another thing to troubleshoot when something breaks at 2am

I run a similar setup, been doing internet linked remote ops for probably 4 years now. Honestly the ISP issue you're describing is real and there's not a lot you can do about it besides maybe getting a second ISP at the remote end for failover. I run a cellular LTE backup at my remote site and it kicks in automatically if the main connection drops. Expensive but when you have antennas you cant be at, losing access is painful.

As for SDR-Console remote vs RemoteHams — they're kind of different animals. RemoteHams integrates rig CAT control pretty tightly which is the main reason people stick with it despite the quirks. SDR-Console remote is cleaner for pure SDR receive but youre right that rig control is more limited depending on what radio you have. What radio is it? That might change what options actually make sense for your setup.