So ive been trying to get a proper remote station going for about three months now and im at the point where im not sure if the problem is my setup or just the nature of doing this over the internet. Running RCForb client connecting to my home station, got a SDRplay RSP1A on the remote end feeding into the SDR side of things so i can monitor the band while operating, and the whole thing works... kind of.

The audio latency on the control side is somewhere around 400-500ms which makes SSB conversations feel really weird, like im always stepping on people or leaving dead air. I read somewhere that RemoteHams can get this down to like 150ms if you tweak the codec settings but i cant figure out where that actually is in the software. Anybody using this regularly for like actual rag chews or is everyone just doing CW and digital where latency doesnt matter as much

Also the SDR part -- is there a way to have the panadapter update faster? Right now it feels like its updating maybe once a second which isnt terrible but id like to see propagation changes a bit quicker. my upload at home is only about 15Mbps so maybe thats the bottleneck idk

the 400-500ms thing is pretty normal if you havent touched the audio buffer settings. in RCForb go into the server config and look for the codec, if youre using the default it might be set to something conservative. dropping to OPUS at lower bitrate actually helps latency more than you'd think even though that sounds backwards. also check if youre running through the RemoteHams relay servers vs direct connection -- relay adds a ton of latency, direct p2p between your client and the server is way better if your firewall allows it. port 40000 UDP needs to be open on the server side.

for the SDR panadapter refresh honestly 15 up should be plenty, might be a CPU thing on the remote machine if its older hardware. what are you running on that end

yeah SSB over remote is workable but you kind of have to adjust your operating style a bit. i run a remote setup about 200 miles from home and once i got used to the delay it became second nature to just wait a beat longer before transmitting. not ideal but you adapt. CW is definitely easier for this reason, and FT8 is totally fine obviously since the timing is all software controlled anyway.

one thing that helped me a lot was setting up a second audio path with lower quality just for monitoring so i could hear the band in near-realtime and use the main high quality stream just for actual QSOs. probably overkill but it works for me