so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and im kind of at a crossroads. right now i have a basic setup using a raspberry pi and some custom scripts to control my IC-7300 over the internet, works okay but its a pain to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird it falls apart for a day or two while i figure out whats happening

somebody at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a little bit, also been reading about the SDR remote stuff they have going. the idea of not having to babysit port forwarding and dynamic DNS is appealing but im not sure if its worth essentially depending on a third party service for something i want to use for emcomm backup purposes

also semi-related, anyone using internet linking like echolink or IRLP alongside a proper remote HF setup? wondering if theres any advantage to bridging those two worlds or if thats just a weird idea that doesnt make practical sense. my thinking was maybe use the VHF/UHF linking for local nets and have the HF remote for everything else but all on the same infrastructure at the remote site

anyway curious what people are running, especially if youve tried RemoteHams and have opinions on the SDR client vs using something like SDR# or HDSDR through a VPN

ive been on RemoteHams for a couple years now and honestly for the connectivity side of things its solid, the RCForb client they use is not the prettiest software but it does work and the latency is usually acceptable for SSB, less so for CW unless your connection is really clean on both ends. the SDR remote thing is newer and i havent used it as much but from what i played with it streams the IQ data pretty decently, better than i expected over a 25Mbps uplink at the remote end

your concern about third party dependency for emcomm is valid though. what i do is run RemoteHams as the primary because its convenient, but i also have a WireGuard VPN tunnel set up as a fallback that my buddy can walk me through enabling if the RemoteHams connection craps out. that way i have two paths to the radio. the dynamic DNS issue you mentioned -- i just use a cheap VPS as a jump host and that basically solves it, radio end connects out to the VPS so it doesnt matter what my home ISP does

on the echolink/IRLP combo idea, yeah people do run both at the same site, usually on a separate node machine. i wouldnt say there's a huge advantage tying them together architecturally unless you have a specific use case but there's nothing stopping you from having both

the CW latency thing is real, ran into that myself. anything over like 80ms round trip and youre gonna have a bad time trying to key by hand through a remote, even with the good clients. most people doing serious CW remote stuff just use a keyer that lives at the radio end and send speed/message commands rather than trying to pass the actual keying over the network

dont overthink the echolink integration tbh, its a completely different beast and the overlap in use cases is pretty small unless youre trying to do linked repeater stuff which is its own rabbit hole