so ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now, mostly using RCForb client to connect to my shack at home while im at work. works pretty well for HF but i started thinking about whether i could tie in an SDR on the same box and have it feed the panadapter over the same connection. the latency is already annoying enough on SSB phone, im just wondering if adding an RTL-SDR or maybe an Airspy into the mix is going to make things worse or if it kind of runs independently enough that it doesnt matter.

also separate question but related — anyone tried linking a RemoteHams node into something like Echolink or IRLP so you can bridge the remote station to a local repeater? i know thats kind of a weird hybrid thing to do but ive got a buddy who doesnt have a license yet and wants to listen in on some of the stuff i work on 40m, figured maybe there was a way to do it without giving him full control of anything. not even sure thats legal or practical im just thinking out loud here.

the SDR panadapter question is actually pretty reasonable — i run an Airspy HF+ Discovery on the same machine as my remote node and it doesnt really interact with the control latency at all because theyre separate data streams. the SDR IQ data is going out over its own connection, RCForb handles the rig control and audio separately. what you might run into is just raw bandwidth, especially if youre on a mediocre upload at the shack end. SDR data at higher sample rates eats bandwidth fast. i dropped my Airspy down to 192kHz and it was fine on a 10Mbps upload but anything above that was getting choppy during busy band conditions.

the Echolink bridging thing though, i honestly dont know if that gets weird with Part 97. you can monitor no problem but if your buddy is keying up through Echolink and it somehow gets routed back out on HF youre in a gray area maybe. id just set him up a read-only listener account in RCForb, think there might be an option for that, been a while since i dug into the settings.

yeah dont overcomplicate this. if he just wants to listen just point him at a websdr, there are tons of them and they require zero setup on your end. globaltuners or the university websdr sites cover pretty much every band. saves you the headache of figuring out the legality and you dont have to babysit your own server for his curiosity sessions lol