so ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a proper remote setup going at my brother in laws place about 40 miles out. he's got way better RF environment than me, basically zero noise floor, so it makes sense to put the radio out there. running an IC-7300 and feeding it through the RemoteHams client software which honestly works better than i expected for the most part.

the issue im running into is the latency when i try to link it through their internet linking side. on a good day its maybe 200ms which is fine for SSB but when it spikes — and it does spike — it gets pretty unusable. tried tweaking the buffer settings in the client but it feels like im just guessing at this point. also noticed the SDR remote feed and the actual control channel seem to get out of sync sometimes, like the audio is slightly behind where the rig actually is tuning-wise if that makes sense.

anyone else dealt with this? wondering if its a QoS thing on his end or if there's something baked into how RemoteHams handles the stream prioritization. his router is just a standard ISP provided box so maybe thats the culprit. or is there a way to run a dedicated VPN tunnel and bypass some of the RemoteHams relay infrastructure for lower latency

yeah the ISP router is almost certainly your problem, those things have terrible QoS defaults and usually dont even let you configure anything useful. if you can get him to either put it in bridge mode and use a real router, or at least get into the admin page and try to prioritize UDP traffic, that alone might make a noticeable difference. the RemoteHams audio stream is UDP based and it tends to get deprioritized by cheap routers whenever anything else on the network kicks up traffic.

on the sync thing between the SDR feed and the control channel — ive seen that too and i honestly think its just a timing artifact when the connection hiccups. it usually self-corrects after a few seconds. if it persists it might be worth checking if youre running the SDR remote and the rig control on the same TCP session or separate ones, cant remember off the top of my head how RemoteHams handles that by default.

the VPN tunnel idea is worth trying but in my experience it adds a little overhead of its own, maybe not worth it unless the routing between you two is genuinely bad. you could run a traceroute and see how many hops youre going through via the RemoteHams relay vs direct.

200ms is honestly not that bad for SSB remote work, ive operated through worse. but yeah the spikes are what kill you. one thing i did at my remote site was just plug the remote computer directly into the router via ethernet instead of wifi, obvious maybe but it cut my jitter down a lot. also gave the remote PC a static IP on the LAN so the router wasnt doing any weird DHCP renewal stuff at inconvenient times.

dont know enough about the RemoteHams internals to help with the sync issue but curious what upload speed hes got on that connection because ive found the upload side matters more than people think for keeping the control link stable