so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i keep going back and forth on this. my current setup is hamlib + flrig talking to my IC-7300 over a VPN tunnel and it mostly works but audio latency is annoying sometimes, like ill be mid-QSO and the other guy is already on to his next sentence before i even hear what he said. using mumble for audio which is actually pretty decent latency wise but getting all the pieces to talk to each other was a genuine pain.

anyway someone at the club mentioned RemoteHams and the SDR remote stuff and i went down that rabbit hole last night. looks like they have a pretty polished client and the whole thing is more integrated than what ive cobbled together. but im reading mixed reviews about the SDR side — like the remote SDR client seems to be more aimed at just listening rather than full control of a transceiver? maybe im misreading the docs.

also the internet linking angle — some guys in the linked system thread were talking about bridging remote SDR access with like an Allstar or IRLP node for local monitoring, which sounds neat but also sounds like a nightmare to actually implement. has anyone done something like that or am i just overcomplicating this in my head. curious what people have actually gotten working long term vs whats just cool in theory.

yeah the RemoteHams client is actually pretty solid for full transceiver control, not just SDR receive — i think the confusion is they have two separate things on the site and the SDR remote piece is kind of a different track. i ran my 7610 through it for about a year when i was living in an apartment and it worked better than i expected. the audio codec they use compresses pretty aggressively at lower bandwidth settings which can be an issue on phone but for CW it really doesnt matter at all. latency was fine for normal ragchewing, maybe 200-300ms depending on my home internet, which isnt great for contesting but liveable.

the VPN DIY route you have is more flexible honestly, especially if you want to run digital modes through it because you have full control over the audio path. RemoteHams does support some digital but its kind of bolted on. one thing i never sorted out with my homebrew setup was PTT timing — kept getting clipped leading edges on transmit until i added a small delay in flrig. might be worth checking if thats contributing to your audio weirdness.

the allstar bridging idea isnt as crazy as it sounds but yeah its a bit of a project. i know one guy in our section who has an RPi running both an allstar node and a small SDR receiver and he just manually kicks off whatever he needs depending on what he wants to monitor. its not integrated in any clean way, more like two separate things sitting on the same box. the internet linking through IRLP specifically has gotten kind of flakey in my experince, nodes go offline and stay offline for months sometimes. allstar seems healthier these days for that kind of thing if your going that route.