so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and im at this crossroads where i cant decide if i should just commit to RemoteHams or keep building out my own thing with a raspberry pi and some custom scripts. my current setup uses a flrig talking to my IC-7300 over a VPN and it mostly works but the latency on the audio is driving me insane, like there's this half second delay that makes SSB basically unusable and i find myself just defaulting to FT8 because at least that doesnt care about latency

anyway i started looking at RemoteHams more seriously and the SDR remote side of it actually looks pretty interesting to me. the idea of being able to spin up a wide spectrum view from wherever i am and then dig into a signal is appealing. has anyone actually used their SDR remote feature for anything beyond just casual listening? im thinking about it from a DX hunting perspective, like if i could have a remote SDR at the home QTH while i travel would that actually be useful or is the latency still going to kill me

also curious if anyone has tried mixing internet linking into this kind of setup, like using something like AllStar or even just echolink to tie in a VHF node on the remote end so you can work local nets while youre somewhere else. feels like that should work in theory but im not sure if the audio routing gets messy when you have multiple things trying to grab the soundcard

the latency thing on SSB is real and honestly RemoteHams doesnt completely solve it, it just manages it better with their codec. if your internet on both ends is decent you can usually get it down to where SSB is workable but its never gonna feel like sitting in front of the radio. for DX hunting the SDR remote piece is actually where it shines though, being able to see a 2MHz slice of spectrum and click around is genuinely useful. i used it during the last CQ WW from a hotel room and found a few mults i definitely would have missed just tuning blind

the AllStar mixing thing is doable but youre right that audio routing gets hairy. i tried it once with a virtual audio cable setup and it worked until it didnt, kept getting feedback loops through the monitor chain. if you really want to do it cleanly you probably need a dedicated machine at the remote end just for the linking node, dont try to share it with the HF remote audio

im running a pretty similar setup to what you described with the 7300 and VPN and yeah SSB remote is kind of a pain. one thing that helped me a lot was switching from openvpn to wireguard, the latency dropped noticably. still not perfect but its better. havent tried RemoteHams myself so cant compare directly but a few guys in my club swear by it for portable ops