so ive been running a remote station setup for about 8 months now using RemoteHams with an SDR on the rx side and a separate TX chain controlled through their client software and the connection just absolutely refuses to stay stable once im actually in a QSO. like it'll sit there perfectly fine while im tuning around, waterfall looks great, audio is clean, and then the second someone comes back to my CQ it just tanks. latency spikes, audio breaks up, sometimes the whole client just drops me back to the login screen.

my upload at the remote site is solid, running about 35 up through a cable connection, ping to the server is like 18ms which seems fine to me. ive tried messing with the audio buffer settings in the client and bumped it up from 200ms to 400ms which helped a tiny bit but didnt really fix anything. the TX control side actually stays connected fine its just the SDR audio path that goes sideways.

im wondering if this is a RemoteHams server routing issue or if theres something specific about how they handle the SDR stream during periods of higher activity on their end. has anyone done any packet captures on the audio stream to see whats actually happening. i feel like im missing something obvious here but ive been staring at this for weeks and dont have a fresh set of eyes on it anymore.

had almost the exact same thing happen when i first set up my remote. turned out the issue wasnt the upload bandwidth itself but the router at the remote site was doing some kind of traffic shaping or QoS thing that was deprioritizing the UDP audio packets once the TX keying traffic started hitting at the same time. basically the router saw two simultaneous streams and just decided the audio was less important. i threw the remote station machine into the DMZ temporarily just to test and the dropouts went away completely. not a permanent fix obviously but it told me where to look.

also worth checking if your ISP at the remote end does any burst throttling. 35mbps sounds like enough headroom but some cable providers will let you sustain that for a bit and then quietly step it down when you hold the connection open for more than a minute or two. RemoteHams audio stream isnt huge but if the pipe is getting squeezed even a little it shows up pretty fast.

honestly the RemoteHams SDR integration has always been a bit finicky in my experience compared to just running something like SDR-Console with a direct connection to the hardware. i know that defeats the whole point of using their platform for the internet linking side but the third party SDR bridging they do adds another layer of stuff that can go wrong. what SDR hardware are you actually using on the remote end? if its an RTL-SDR or something in that family those can have USB dropout issues that look exactly like a network problem but its actually the SDR itself hiccuping and then the stream just never recovers cleanly.