so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now and finally got a decent setup going at my QTH with a remote desktop situation over VPN, works fine for the most part but latency is a killer when im trying to work split on DX pileups. someone in my club mentioned RemoteHams and specifically using their SDR remote client alongside some kind of internet linking for the audio path and i honestly wasnt sure what they were talking about.

i did some digging and it seems like RemoteHams has its own protocol thing going on, not just a raw VNC session like i was doing before. has anyone actually run this with an SDR on the remote end? im thinking SDRplay or maybe an Airspy feeding into the server software. the idea being you get the full panoramic waterfall over the link which would be way more useful than trying to work blind like i have been.

the part im fuzzy on is the audio routing. like if the linked audio is going through their server infrastructure does that add a fixed delay on top of whatever my internet connection already has, or is it more peer to peer? i dont want to set all this up and find out the round trip latency makes CW basically unusable. anyone running this day to day who can comment on what its actually like in practice?

yeah i ran RemoteHams for about two years with an IC-7300 at a remote site about 45 miles from home. the audio path in the newer client versions is pretty much direct UDP between you and the host machine, theres a server in the middle for the initial handshake and session negotiation but the actual audio and CAT data goes peer to peer once the connection is established, at least thats how it worked when i last dug into it. so your latency is basically your internet path plus whatever the host machines processing overhead is.

the SDR panoramic thing though, thats where it gets interesting. ive seen people feed an SDRplay into SDR-Console and then kind of run that alongside the RemoteHams session in a separate window so you get the waterfall from the SDR while the actual TX and RX audio goes through the rig. its a bit janky to set up honestly and you end up with two separate connections but it does work. the delay i had on CW was workable, maybe 150ms on a good day over my home cable connection, not great but i could still copy and send without completely losing my mind. 200ms plus though and it starts feeling really wrong.

dont overthink the SDR part just use whatever rig you have on the remote end and let RemoteHams handle the audio, the built in waterfall on something like an 7610 or even a cheaper rig with a panadapter output is going to be more practical than trying to sync a separate SDR stream over the same link imo. ive tried the dual stream approach and keeping the two things in sync is a headache you dont need. the latency question is real though, i cant speak to their current infrastructure but when i tested it a while back from my cabin setup it was totally fine for SSB and even digital but i wouldnt want to do serious CW contesting over it