so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and cant decide. currently have a IC-7300 at my home QTH and i want to be able to run it from my office which is about 40 miles away. decent fiber at both ends so bandwidth isnt really the concern.

ive looked at RemoteHams and the RCForb client software and it seems pretty solid for rig control and audio but im wondering if anyone has actually compared that against something like running your own VPN with flrig and a dedicated audio pipe. the RemoteHams SDR remote side of things also caught my eye — seems like you can access other peoples SDRs through the network which would be kind of cool for monitoring while youre in QSO from the remote end, like having a second set of ears on a different band.

also the whole internet linking angle confuses me a bit. i know echolink and allstar are a thing but is any of that integrated into the RemoteHams ecosystem or is that totally separate. maybe im mixing things up. anyway if anyone has run this setup for more than just casual use id love to hear what actually breaks first because thats usually how you learn what matters

ran RCForb with a 7600 for about a year and a half before i switched to a fully manual VPN + rigctld setup. honest opinion — RCForb is fine and it works, the audio latency is acceptable most of the time, but you're kind of stuck in their ecosystem and when something goes sideways you're debugging someone elses abstraction layer which gets old fast. i had an issue where the PTT would occasionally stick in transmit for like 200ms after release and i never fully figured out if it was the client, the server software on the shack end, or something in my router. never happened with my DIY setup.

the SDR remote stuff through RemoteHams is actually pretty neat though, i'll give them that. being able to pull up a panadapter from someone elses rx-only node while youre transmitting from your own remote rig is a legit use case especially for contest work where you want to see whats happening adjacent to your run frequency. i dont think the echolink/allstar stuff integrates at all, those are totally different protocols and different communities pretty much. allstar is all SIP-ish VOIP over node networks, completely seperate world.

the "what breaks first" question is easy — your home internet connection goes down and you have no way to reset the router remotely lol. ask me how i know. get a 4G backup or at minimum one of those smart plugs you can hit from your phone on a completely separate connection so you can power cycle stuff. learned that the hard way during a contest weekend and lost like 6 hours because my ISP had a node issue and my only option was to drive home.

dont overthink the SDR remote side at first, just get the basic rig control working reliably before you start layering stuff on top of it