so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and im at the point where i need to decide whether to keep going with RemoteHams or just bite the bullet and set up my own thing with something like flrig and a VPN back to the shack. the RemoteHams client works ok but honestly the SDR remote side of things has been kind of a mixed bag for me, sometimes the waterfall just decides to freeze and i have to reconnect and by then whatever i was chasing is long gone on 17m

the main thing i like about it is the internet linking stuff, being able to hop on from a hotel and just work a pile-up without lugging equipment is pretty nice. but the latency when im more than like 500 miles from the station is noticeable enough that SSB feels a bit weird. CW is actually fine, go figure

anyone else running a hybrid setup or did you just pick one and stick with it? also curious if anyone has tried tying in a proper SDRplay or Airspy on the remote end instead of just using the transceiver's IF output, wondering if that helps with the waterfall lag or if its a bandwidth thing on my end

yeah the waterfall freeze thing is a known annoyance with the RemoteHams SDR mode, at least in my experience. i ended up putting a dedicated SDRplay RSP1A on the remote end feeding a separate SDR-Console session and that helped a lot actually. the transceiver IF tap was always a bit of a compromise anyway depending on what rig you're using. latency on the audio side is still gonna be whatever your internet connection decides to do that day though, not much you can do about physics

i tried the full DIY route with RigCtld and a VPN for a while and it works but you're basically your own IT department forever. every time my ISP at the remote site does something weird i'm troubleshooting at 11pm. RemoteHams at least has some infrastructure behind it even if its not perfect. for casual remote ops i just keep using it and accept the occasional freeze

CW being better than SSB over remote links is just how it is, you get used to it. the audio codec handling on most of these systems is tuned more for voice intelligibility than low latency and CW basically doesn't care as much about a few hundred ms of jitter. i ran a remote station for a club for a couple years using a completely homebrewed setup, hamlib on the back end, mumble for audio believe it or not, and a cheap VPS in between. worked suprisingly well for contesting but getting new members set up on it was a nightmare every single time