so ive been messing with remote station control for about 6 months now and i finally got a setup i'm mostly happy with but the internet linking side of things is still driving me nuts. running RemoteHams RCForb on a windows box at the remote site, which is at my buddy's place about 40 miles out in a much quieter RF environment than my house. the rig out there is an IC-7300 and it works great when the connection behaves itself.

the issue is latency spikes — like the audio will be fine for 20 minutes then suddenly go choppy and i lose the CAT control sync for a few seconds. i bumped the jitter buffer up but that just makes the audio delay worse and then i feel like i'm operating through molasses. his ISP is one of those rural fixed wireless things which probably doesnt help, im on a normal cable connection on my end.

also started playing with the SDR side — he's got an RTL-SDR dongle plugged in as a panadapter feed and i pull that through separately over the same link. i dont know if running both streams simultaneously is making the bandwidth problem worse or if it's just the fixed wireless being flaky. anyone been through this and figured out a good buffer/codec tradeoff? i tried dropping the audio to 8kHz mono and that helped a little but still not great on SSB.

yeah the fixed wireless thing is your main culprit i'd bet. i ran a similar setup for about a year using a wisp connection at the remote end and the jitter was just unpredictable, didnt matter what i did on the software side. you can tune buffers all day but if the underlying link is dropping packets in bursts there's not much RCForb can do about it.

what worked for me was actually setting up a separate low-bandwidth heartbeat monitor so i could see when the packet loss was actually happening vs just feeling like it was. turns out mine was only bad during certain times of day when the tower was congested. once i knew the pattern i just avoided operating during those windows which isnt ideal but it worked.

on the SDR stream question — yes absolutely running that concurrently hurts you. the RTL data stream is not small especially if you've got a decent sample rate set. i'd either schedule them so you're not pulling both at once or look at running the SDR through a lower sample rate just for the panadapter function. 1.2 MSPS is probably overkill if you just want to see the band around your operating freq.

remoterig boxes might be worth a look if you get tired of the software stack — i know that's kind of a different direction but the dedicated hardware handles the audio codec stuff at a lower level and i've had way better luck with marginal links using one of those than any PC software solution. not saying RCForb is bad just that hardware dedicated to the task tends to be more resilient when the connection gets weird.

also for what its worth i did a remote setup for a friend and we ended up using a starlink at the remote end and it basically solved all our latency issues overnight. yeah the latency isnt as low as a wired connection but it's at least consistent which for remote operating is honestly more important than raw speed.