so ive been running a remote station at my parents place about 90 miles away for maybe two years now, using a mix of hamlib, a raspberry pi, and a VPN tunnel to get into the shack. works fine most of the time but it's kind of a house of cards honestly, every time there's a power blip or the router at that end does something weird i'm spending an hour troubleshooting from here and occasionally driving up there which kind of defeats the purpose

anyway a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and be done with it, says the client software handles most of the annoying bits and the audio latency is manageable for SSB work. i looked at it and the SDR side of things actually looks pretty interesting, like you can expose a wideband SDR to registered users and it functions as kind of a community resource which is cool in concept

my main hesitation is i've also been poking around with the idea of linking the remote into some kind of internet gateway situation, not full echolink but something where club members could at least monitor the HF bands remotely through the SDR without needing to actually key up. has anyone done something like that through RemoteHams or is that getting too complicated and i should just keep my janky VPN setup and stop overthinking it

the RemoteHams client is honestly pretty solid for what it is, i ran it for about a year before switching back to a custom setup because i wanted more control over the audio pipeline. the SDR feature you're talking about is real and works, you basically register your SDR source (i used an RTL-SDR feeding into it, though an Airspy or similar is way better for the dynamic range) and it shows up in their network for other users to tune around on. for club use that could actually be pretty nice if your members are okay with making accounts

the latency thing is real for CW but for just monitoring or casual SSB it's fine. where i found it fell apart was anything PTT-critical, there's just enough jitter on a bad day that it gets frustrating. your VPN approach is actually probably lower latency if your connection is stable, the issue you're describing sounds more like the watchdog and power management side of things not the protocol itself. a good smart PDU with remote reboot capability fixed most of my similar headaches, something like the WattBox or even a cheaper TP-Link Kasa setup wired to the Pi's power circuit

yeah i dont have experience with RemoteHams specifically but the sharing-an-SDR-with-the-club thing is something we looked into a while back. we ended up going with OpenWebRX running on a local server at the club station and just punching a hole through the firewall for club members, which sounds scarier than it is if you lock it down properly. worked great for letting people monitor 20m and 40m without giving them actual transmit access, which was the whole point

the internet linking question kind of depends what you mean by linking, if you mean tying it into like an Allstar node or something that's a whole different rabbit hole and probably overkill for HF monitoring purposes