so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a pretty decent station at home, ic-7300 and a decent antenna setup, but i'm at the apartment about 5 days a week for work and obviously cant put up anything there. started looking at options and went down the whole rabbit hole of RemoteHams, SDR remote stuff, and then the whole internet linking angle through things like echolink and allstar which is a totally different thing i know but someone in my club kept bringing it up as an alternative.

ended up setting up a trial with RemoteHams just to see what the latency situation was really like. honestly for SSB it was... fine? like not great but usable. the audio path adds maybe 200-250ms round trip on a decent connection which you notice on SSB but its not the end of the world. CW would drive me insane though, i tried it for about 10 minutes and gave up. maybe im just too used to local keying feel.

the SDR remote angle is interesting to me because i was thinking about sticking an SDRplay or something out at the home QTH and running that alongside the main rig, so i could at least do receive-only monitoring when the latency makes TX annoying. has anyone actually run a parallel setup like that, like a proper transceiver through RemoteHams for TX and then a separate SDR remote feed just for RX situational awareness? feels like overkill but also feels like it might actually be useful for like contesting remotely where you want to know whats happening on a second band.

anyway curious what people are actually doing for day to day remote ops, not the theoretical stuff, like what actually works when you sit down and try to make contacts.

yeah the CW latency thing is a real problem with any of the hosted remote solutions. what i ended up doing was moving away from RemoteHams for anything serious and just running my own setup with a raspberry pi at the home end, hamlib over a VPN tunnel, and then audio through something like mumble which you can tune the jitter buffer on. gets the round trip down quite a bit if your home connection isnt garbage. still not the same as sitting in the shack but CW is at least workable now, i run maybe 15-18wpm remotely without wanting to throw something.

on the SDR alongside the main rig idea - i actually do exactly this. RSP1A sitting on a wideband antenna at home, running SDR-Console server mode, and i just connect to it from wherever i am. super useful for spotting before i commit the main rig to a frequency. the bandwidth overhead is nothing if you keep the sample rate reasonable, i run 2mhz wide and its fine on a 20mbps connection. only downside is you gotta keep another machine running at home which adds to the points of failure.

the echolink comparison always confuses people because its genuinely a different usecase - like linking is about connecting repeaters and VHF/UHF infrastructure together, its not really a substitute for remote HF ops, your club guy might have been thinking about it differently. unless you just want to ragchew on 2m from the apartment in which case yeah a linked repeater or even just a hotspot running dvmega or something would work fine and honestly way less headache than setting up full HF remote.

for what its worth i ran RemoteHams for about a year before i just got fed up with their client software on windows. felt dated and i kept having issues with the audio codec dropping out randomly. switched to a self hosted thing and never looked back but it took me a weekend to get it all sorted out so if you dont want to mess with that the convenience of RemoteHams is real, it just has tradeoffs.