So ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now and started out just using RemoteHams because it seemed like the easiest entry point. Got it working pretty well with my IC-7300 out at my parents place about 40 miles away, the latency is manageable for SSB but CW is kinda rough sometimes depending on what the internet is doing out there.

Anyway the reason im posting is I came across some stuff about people building their own systems using things like flrig plus some kind of VoIP layer and maybe a rasberry pi handling the CAT control, and I'm wondering if anyone has actually gone through both approaches and has opinions. The RemoteHams client software is fine but it feels like I'm kind of at the mercy of their servers for the connection brokering, which has bit me a couple times when their stuff was down and I needed to get on for a net.

Also separate question — does anyone have experience with the SDR side of RemoteHams? Like the remote SDR panadapter thing. I see some stations have that set up and it looks pretty slick but I dont know how much extra overhead it puts on the connection. My parents place only has like 15mbps down which is fine for voice but I dont want to saturate it.

yeah i've done both and honestly they serve different purposes. RemoteHams is great if you want something that just works and you dont want to spend a weekend debugging port forwarding and firewall rules. The server dependency thing is real though, I think they had a pretty significant outage maybe 18 months ago and a bunch of people got burned. After that I set up a parallel path using hamlib over a VPN so I have a fallback if their broker goes down.

The SDR panadapter in RemoteHams is actually pretty bandwidth efficient from what ive seen, I ran it on a connection that was maybe 10-12mbps down and it was fine, you can tune the FFT update rate and the span. Where you start running into trouble is if you're also pushing audio at the same time obviously but even then it's not as bad as youd think if you drop the audio codec quality a bit. The 7300's built in panadapter passthrough over the USB is what I use and that works fine as the remote SDR source.

I went full DIY about two years ago after messing with a couple of the turnkey platforms. I use a combination of flrig, mumble for audio, and a small NUC running ubuntu at the remote end. Took a solid weekend to get right and there was some stuff with the firewall at the remote QTH that drove me nuts but once it was dialed in its been rock solid. Total control, no dependency on anyones servers going up or down.

That said I wouldnt necessarily recommend it to someone who isnt comfortable with linux and networking. RemoteHams really does lower the barrier a lot. If you're mainly doing casual ops and the occasional net check-in it's probably fine. The internet linking angle is interesting too if you want to tie in something like EchoLink or IRLP for VHF/UHF remote access but thats kind of a different rabbit hole entirely, I spent way too long getting an Allstar node talking to my remote HF setup and im still not sure it was worth it.