so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my HOA situation is basically impossible so the only real option i have for HF is running a remote station somewhere else. a buddy offered to let me put up a dipole at his property about 40 miles away and ive been trying to figure out the best way to actually control it over the internet.

ive looked at RemoteHams and it seems solid but i honestly cant tell if its worth paying for the client software when i could theoretically just cobble something together with an SDR setup, maybe an RTL-SDR or an Airspy on the receive side and then figure out TX separately. the problem is the TX side is where things get complicated obviously — you cant just slap an SDR on it and call it a day.

has anyone actually used RemoteHams for a long term setup like this? im curious how the latency feels during an actual QSO, like is it workable for SSB or are we talking basically digital modes only. also wondering about the linking side — does it play nice with stuff like Echolink or is that a whole separate rabbit hole

been running a remote setup through RemoteHams for about two years now, base station is at my parents place in a rural county and i operate from my apartment. latency is totally workable for SSB if your internet on both ends isnt garbage — i run it on maybe 15-20ms round trip and you do get used to the slight delay. you kind of learn to pause a half beat longer before replying in a QSO and most people on the other end have no idea youre remote.

the software itself is pretty mature at this point, the RCForb client works well, and the server side runs fine on a cheap windows box at the remote end. you do need a decent audio codec setup and you have to think carefully about VOX or keying — i use a CAT-controlled rig with the RCForb interface and it handles PTT cleanly. for Echolink thats really a separate thing, theyre not integrated, different protocols entirely. if you want internet linking you're looking at either IRLP or Echolink as its own node situation, they dont really overlap with the RemoteHams ecosystem unless you manually bridge something which i wouldnt bother with.

the SDR-only route for remote RX is genuinely fun but yeah the TX problem is the whole thing. i looked at pairing an Airspy with a remote antenna and doing SDR rx plus a separate PTT relay chain for TX and it gets complicated fast, lots of latency problems and sync issues. RemoteHams just handles all that more cleanly if you have a real transceiver at the remote end.

the latency thing people worry about is kinda overstated in my experience. did a pileup on 17m last winter from my work laptop using my home station running RCForb and honestly worked like 8 or 9 stations no problem. the bigger issue for me was my upload speed at the remote end being kind of mediocre, had some audio dropout issues until i dropped the codec bitrate a bit in the settings.

one thing nobody mentions is the security side — you really want to think about who has access to your transmitter sitting at somebodys house, make sure the RemoteHams server config has proper authentication set up and dont just leave it on the default port if you can help it. had a weird situation where someone was apparently trying to brute force my server login, nothing got in but still annoying