so ive been messing with remote station control for about 6 months now and i think i finally have a decent setup but wanted to get some input from people who actually run this stuff day to day. my shack is about 40 miles from home, its at my brother in laws property out in the sticks so the antenna situation is way better than my HOA nightmare back home.

right now im running RemoteHams RCForb server on a windows box out there with a Kenwood TS-590SG and it works pretty well most of the time. latency is usually around 80-90ms which is fine for HF but id really like to add an SDR front end so i can do some panadapter style monitoring even when im not actively transmitting. was thinking about tossing an RTL-SDR or maybe a SDRplay RSPdx into the mix and running it through the same internet link somehow.

the part where i get confused is the linking side of things. ive seen people tie this stuff into echolink or IRLP nodes and im not totally sure if that makes sense for what im doing or if thats a completely different animal. like is there any reason to have an echolink node at the remote site or does that just add more points of failure. the upload bandwidth out there is only about 15 mbps so i dont want to saturate the pipe if multiple things are going at once.

anyone running a similar hybrid setup, curious how you handled the SDR piece specifically

the SDR piece is honestly easier than you think once you seperate it in your head from the control link. what i do is run SDR# or SDRuno locally and just pipe the IQ stream over the LAN at the remote site, then tunnel it back. if you go the SDRplay route there's that RSP TCP server thing that works pretty well over a stable connection, though it does eat more bandwidth than you'd expect — figure maybe 3-4 mbps depending on your sample rate settings so it shouldnt kill your 15 meg pipe as long as you're not also streaming full res audio from RCForb at the same time.

the echolink question — yeah thats kind of a different thing entirely. echolink and IRLP are really for linking repeaters or nodes so VHF/UHF users can access each other, its not really meant to layer onto an HF remote setup the way you're describing. you could technically put an echolink node out there if you have a 2m radio at the site too but thats a whole separate project and yeah more failure points like you said. id just leave that alone unless you have a specific reason for it.

one thing i'll say is make sure your remote box has a watchdog on it. i learned the hard way that windows update will just reboot the thing at 3am and then you have no way to get back in without calling your brother in law

80-90ms is totally fine for HF work, ive run CW contests through worse. the SDR panadapter idea is solid though, I added an SDRplay to my remote last year and it changed how i operate honestly. being able to see the whole band while transmitting is something i didnt know i was missing until i had it.

the bandwidth thing is real tho. if you start pulling a wide IQ stream AND running RCForb audio youll feel it. i had to throttle my sample rate down to like 2 MHz or so just to keep things smooth. still plenty of spectrum to look at.