so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and im at the point where i need to decide whether to just commit to RemoteHams or keep trying to build my own thing with a raspberry pi and some SDR gear. my current setup is a pi 4 running SDRangel with an RTL-SDR and it kinda works but the latency is all over the place and i cant figure out if its my router, my ISP, or just the software being weird

the thing is i already have a decent HF rig at the home QTH (IC-7300) and i want to be able to hit it from work or from the car on the laptop. i looked at RemoteHams and it seems pretty polished but i dunno if the SDR remote piece is really integrated well or if its more of an afterthought. i also saw some stuff about internet linking which made me think about whether i could tie this into my local IRLP node somehow, probably a different rabbit hole entirely

anyone whos done both the DIY route and also tried RemoteHams have an opinion on which way is less painful? im not afraid to get into config files and stuff but i also dont want to spend another three weekends debugging something that should just work

yeah i went through almost the exact same thing about two years ago. started with a pi running a combo of rigctld and some custom scripts to talk to my 7300, and honestly the audio path was the killer for me — i kept getting these weird dropouts that turned out to be a buffer size issue in the audio daemon but it took me forever to figure that out. eventually just punted and went with RemoteHams and the difference in just getting on and operating was pretty noticeable

the SDR piece in RemoteHams is ok, its not like having a full SDRuno or SDRangel session but for monitoring and having a panadapter view while you operate its fine. i mostly use it to see whats happening around my freq before i transmit remotely cause the last thing you want is to key up into a QSO thats already going on and you cant hear it on the main rx

the latency thing you mentioned — what codec are you using on the audio side? if youre doing anything uncompressed over the WAN thats gonna be your problem right there. RemoteHams uses OPUS i believe and that makes a big difference compared to just piping raw audio through something like darkice or whatever

irlp and remote control are kinda different beasts so i wouldnt try to mash those together unless you really know what youre doing with the network side. irlp is more about VHF/UHF linking between repeaters and your audio chain has to be pretty clean for it to not sound awful to everyone on the reflector

for the HF remote stuff my honest opinion is RemoteHams is worth the cost just to not deal with the headache. i spent probably 40 hours over a few months trying to get a clean remote setup on my own and RemoteHams just worked the first weekend i tried it. theres a reason people keep using it even though the DIY options are technically capable of doing the same thing