So ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. I have a pretty decent station at home but I travel a lot for work and I want to be able to get on HF when im in hotels and stuff. Right now I have a basic TeamViewer setup that controls the rig through Ham Radio Deluxe but its clunky and the audio latency is all over the place depending on the hotel wifi which as you can imagine is usually terrible.

I was looking at RemoteHams and they have that RCForb client which a lot of people seem to use, and they also have the SDR remote stuff built in now which is interesting because I was already thinking about throwing an RTL-SDR or maybe an SDRplay in the loop as a panadapter. The idea of having that accessible remotely too is kind of appealing.

The question I keep coming back to is whether the RemoteHams ecosystem is actually worth buying into versus just spending the time to build something more custom with like a Raspberry Pi running a VPN and handling the audio through something like mumble or darkice. Ive done some linux stuff before so im not totally scared of that route but I also dont want to spend three weekends debugging it when I could just be operating.

Anyone gone down both paths? Also curious about the internet linking angle -- I was thinking about tying this into my DMR hotspot setup somehow but im not even sure if that makes sense or if im confusing two totally separate things.

The RCForb client honestly works pretty well once you get the server side configured right, which I'll admit took me longer than I expected. The SDR integration is nice if you have something like an RSP1A hanging off the same machine -- you can run it as a second device in the RemoteHams server and clients can pull up the panadapter view independently of whoever is controlling the rig. That part is actually pretty slick.

That said the audio path is still the weak link in any of these setups and RemoteHams is no exception. I run mine through a dedicated VPS and even then hotel wifi is going to murder your QSO quality half the time. The codec options in RCForb help -- I usually drop it to the lower bitrate OPUS setting when bandwidth is garbage and it stays intelligible. Not great for SSB but usable.

On the DMR hotspot thing, those are really two separate worlds. You could theoretically link them through something like MMDVM if you wanted a bridged audio path but thats a whole separate project and I dont think its what RemoteHams is designed for. The internet linking stuff people do with Echolink or AllStar is a different use case -- more about RF linking nodes together over IP rather than remote control of a physical transceiver.

ran the DIY route with wireguard vpn + flrig + fldigi for about a year before i switched to a commercial solution and honestly i dont regret moving on from it. the custom setup was cool and i learned a lot but maintaining it was a part time job. every time something updated something else broke

the RemoteHams SDR piece is genuinely useful if you already have an SDR at the remote site, being able to see whats happening on the band before you even start transmitting is nice. my one gripe is the windows-only client situation, i spend a lot of time on linux laptops and having to spin up a VM to use RCForb is annoying