so ive been running a remote station for about eight months now, got it set up at my brother in laws place out in the country where the noise floor is actually usable unlike my HOA nightmare here. been using RemoteHams RCForb for control and it mostly works but the SDR side of things is giving me grief.

the issue is roughly every 20 to 30 minutes the audio just cuts and the waterfall freezes, the control connection stays up fine i can still see band data and key the rig but the SDR stream dies. i have to close and reopen the client to get it back. its not the internet on my end, ive checked and my upload is steady, and my brother in law has fiber out there so its not his side either at least i dont think so.

i messed around with the buffer settings in RCForb and bumped the jitter buffer up a bit which helped a little but didnt fix it. i also tried switching from the default codec to a lower bitrate one thinking maybe the stream was getting throttled somewhere in the middle but same result. the rig itself is an IC-7300 and the SDR feed is coming off a separate RTL-SDR dongle running as a panadapter basically. RemoteHams is linking them together through their server infrastructure or at least thats how i understand it working.

anybody run into something similar, wondering if its a server side thing or if i need to look harder at my router config out there.

had almost exactly this happen with my remote setup a while back, different hardware but same symptom where the control channel stays alive but the SDR feed just dies. turned out for me it was the router at the remote end doing some kind of connection timeout on what it saw as idle UDP traffic. even though data was flowing the router was occasionally deciding the stream was stale and dropping it. had to get into the router config and extend the UDP session timeout, some consumer routers set that absurdly low like 30 seconds. also worth checking if theres any QoS rules running that might be deprioritizing the SDR stream since its high bandwidth compared to the rig control packets.

the other thing i'd look at is whether the RTL-SDR itself is behaving, those things can be weirdly sensitive to USB power and if its getting marginal voltage it can just drop out silently and the software doesnt always recover gracefully from that.

honestly RemoteHams server infrastructure has been a bit hit or miss in my experience, there are periods where relay latency spikes and i've seen streams die exactly like you're describing. not saying thats definitely your problem but its worth checking their status page or asking in their forum because sometimes its just their end and there's not much you can do on your side. i moved one of my links over to using a direct connection instead of going through their relay servers and stability got way better, less convenient to set up but it holds together a lot more reliably for longer qsos.