so ive been trying to get a proper remote station going for about three months now and im mostly there but this one thing is driving me absolutely crazy. using RemoteHams RCForb on the client side and the server software is running on a win10 box at the shack which is about 200 miles away. SDR side is an RTL-SDR V3 piped through into the setup but i also have the actual transceiver patched in for TX.

problem is maybe every 20-30 minutes the connection just drops. not a full disconnect always, sometimes it just freezes the waterfall and the audio goes silent for like 15-20 seconds then comes back, sometimes its a full drop and i have to reconnect. the internet at the remote end is a 50/10 cable connection so its not exactly fiber but it shouldnt be this bad. ive checked the router and the port forwarding looks right, 7300 and the audio ports are all open. latency to that IP is usually around 35ms which seems fine.

anyone seen this behavior before or know what to look at. im wondering if its the router at the remote end doing something weird with idle connections, maybe some kind of timeout thing, but i dont really know where to start poking around.

yeah that timeout thing is almost certainly your problem. a lot of consumer routers will kill UDP sessions that look idle even if they technically arent and RemoteHams uses UDP for the audio stream if i recall correctly. look in your router settings for something like UDP session timeout or NAT timeout and bump it up, some routers have it set to like 30 seconds by default which is absurd. if you cant find it in the GUI you might need to look at flashing DD-WRT or something if the hardware supports it.

also worth checking whether your ISP is doing any traffic shaping on that connection. 50/10 cable sounds fine on paper but a lot of cable providers will throttle or deprioritize certain kinds of sustained UDP traffic, especially in the evenings. ive seen this kill remote audio in a really intermittent way exactly like what youre describing.

had the exact same thing happen to me last winter. turned out the windows firewall on the remote machine was the culprit, not the router at all. something about how it handles persistent connections after the machine had been idle for a while. added a specific inbound rule for the RCForb server ports and it basically stopped happening. still drops occasionally but like once every few hours not every 20 minutes.