so ive been running a remote station at my QTH for about two years now using a mix of stuff — RigCtl over SSH tunneled through a VPS, SDR# piped through a VNC session, its janky but it works most of the time. the latency is tolerable on 40m but anything above that and SSB is kind of a mess to transmit because of the delay messing with my timing.

anyway a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and stop reinventing the wheel. i looked at it and honestly the client software looks pretty decent, and the SDR remote piece is interesting because my station has both a conventional xcvr and an SDRplay RSP1A hooked up for panadapter use. wondering if RemoteHams can actually pipe both simultaneously or if youre just picking one or the other when you connect.

also the internet linking side of this — i know some guys use it to connect into repeater systems or do some kind of echolink-adjacent thing through the platform but im not totally clear on how that works. is that a separate registration or does it all fall under the same account. honestly the documentation is kind of scattered and i cant tell if im missing something obvious.

anyone whos actually run both their own setup and RemoteHams have an opinion on whether its worth switching over or just fixing what i already have

ran my own setup for probably three years before i caved and tried RemoteHams last winter. honestly the client is way more polished than i expected. the SDR remote piece does work alongside the main rig control, theres a separate SDR viewer window that pulls the panadapter feed independently so yeah you can have both running at the same time. i was skeptical but it actually works pretty well, the bandwidth usage is reasonable too which i care about because my remote site is on a rural DSL line.

the latency thing on SSB you mentioned — RemoteHams has a VOX delay compensation setting that helps a lot, its not perfect but its way better than trying to sync it yourself through raw audio streaming. i still get occasional dropouts on 17m when the band is doing weird stuff but thats mostly my internet not the software.

the linking stuff i havent really dug into, i know there are guys using it that way but i mostly just use it for HF operation so cant speak to that part of it much.

the internet linking part through RemoteHams is kind of its own rabbit hole. its not really echolink compatible in the traditional sense, its more like the platform lets registered nodes connect to each other and someone with a gateway can bridge it to a local repeater if they set it up that way. ive seen a few clubs do it to let members operate the club station remotely during nets which is actually pretty slick.

separate registration isnt required per se but the node owner has to configure what access you have, so if youre trying to link into someone elses system youre dependent on them having set it up right on their end. your own station is simpler, you just register it and control who can connect.

personally i still run my own RigCtl setup for HF because i want full control over everything and i dont love having my station accessible through a third party platform even with the access controls. probably paranoid but thats where im at. for SDR only remote access though RemoteHams is honestly pretty hard to beat for the effort involved.