so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now and finally got a decent setup going with RemoteHams but im running into some weirdness when i try to tie the SDR side of things into my linking setup. basically i have an IC-7300 at the remote site, running RCForb client from home, and that part actually works pretty well most of the time. the audio latency is manageable on a decent connection.

the issue is i also want to pull in an SDR feed — ive got an RTL-SDR at the site just for panadapter use — and route that through the same internet link without killing my bandwidth or making the control side laggy. someone told me i could run SDR# or SDRuno and just VNC into the box at the remote end but that seems like a lot of overhead just to see a waterfall. is there a smarter way to do this or am i overthinking it

also separately i keep reading about people using EchoLink or IRLP nodes linked into their remote setups and im not totally sure how that fits in. like are people literally running both a traditional remote station AND a linked repeater node off the same hardware, same internet pipe? seems like it would get messy but maybe im wrong

yeah VNC is basically the lazy answer and it works but you're right that its heavy. what a lot of guys do is run OpenWebRX at the remote site instead — it serves the SDR data as a web stream so you just open a browser tab and youve got your waterfall without streaming a whole desktop. way less bandwidth than VNC and the panadapter lag is pretty acceptable. i run it on a pi4 alongside my main rig control and it doesnt really fight for bandwidth in any noticeable way, at least on a 10mb upstream connection.

the EchoLink thing — yeah some people do run both but usually on separate machines or at least separate processes. mixing remote rig access with a linked node on the same box can get weird with audio routing, especially if you're using something like VAC or VB-Audio to pipe things around. not impossible but you kinda need to think through the audio graph before you start or you end up with feedback loops and a headache

im doing almost exactly this, IC-705 at a cabin about 40 miles out, running RCForb and an rtl dongle for the pan. honestly the SDR piece was the harder part to get right. ended up going with OpenWebRX like the other guy probably mentioned, and just bookmarking it on a second monitor. not perfect but good enough that i can spot things on the waterfall and then grab the VFO from the control client.

the linking stuff i havent tried, got a buddy who runs an Allstar node at his remote site and he says keeping the audio levels balanced between the RF side and the VOIP side is kind of a constant battle. might be worth asking over on the Allstar groups.io list if thats the direction you want to go, those guys are pretty deep in the weeds on that stuff