So ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a proper remote setup going at my QTH in the mountains, the idea being i can run the station from work or when im traveling. Got a decent SDR front end tied into the system and for the most part it works but the audio just drops out randomly, sometimes every few minutes sometimes ill go 20 minutes without a hiccup then it falls apart completely.

The internet connection at the remote site is DSL, not great, somewhere around 6 down and maybe 0.8 up on a good day. I know thats not ideal but it was working better before I added the SDR piece into the chain. Before that I was just doing straight rig control through RemoteHams and the audio was stable enough for casual use. Now with the SDR side of things I feel like the upstream bandwidth is just getting killed.

Anyone dealt with this? Im running the RCForb client on the local end and honestly not sure if the problem is on the server side config or something with how my router at the remote site is handling QoS. Theres also some echolink stuff running on the same machine which maybe is competing for bandwidth but I wasnt changing anything there when the drops started happening.

Would love to know what codec settings people are using for low bandwidth links — I feel like there must be a sweet spot I'm missing.

yeah the upstream is almost certainly your bottleneck, 0.8 up is pretty rough once you start pushing SDR IQ data even at the lower sample rates. what sample rate are you running the SDR at? if youre doing anything above like 250k samples you're probably saturating that uplink pretty fast especially if echolink is also grabbing a chunk of it.

I had a similar mess a while back running a remote on a pretty marginal connection, ended up dropping the SDR sample rate way down and switching to the OPUS codec at a lower bitrate in RCForb, made a huge difference. you lose some bandwidth on the display but for actual listening its totally fine unless you're trying to do wideband monitoring. also worth checking if your router at the site has any kind of traffic shaping — give the RemoteHams traffic higher priority than the echolink node and see if that helps. the two running on the same box competing for upstream is almost definitely part of the problem.

not sure if this is related but I had random audio drops with RCForb that turned out to be a buffer size thing on the server side, not bandwidth at all. the client was just misconfigured and kept starving the audio buffer. worth poking around in the server settings before you go crazy chasing the DSL theory. sometimes the obvious culprit isnt actually the problem.