so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 8 months now and i finally got a somewhat stable setup but theres still this nagging latency issue that i cant seem to nail down. running an IC-7300 at the shack end with a raspberry pi handling the CAT control and audio routing, and on the client side im just using the RemoteHams RCForb client on a windows laptop. the SDR side of things is where it gets weird for me.

i added an RTL-SDR dongle at the remote end thinking id have this nice panadapter view when operating remotely but the bandwidth through my home internet just gets crushed when both the audio stream AND the SDR IQ data are running at the same time. the remote location is on a 25Mbps DSL line which i thought would be enough but apparently not. or maybe im doing the compression wrong idk.

also trying to tie this into a local IRLP node for some VHF linking and im not sure if thats just adding too many moving parts to the whole thing. anyone run a setup like this or am i just trying to do too much at once here

yeah 25Mbps DSL sounds decent on paper but upstream on that is probably like 2-3Mbps max right? thats going to be your bottleneck pretty fast when youre pushing IQ data. the RTL-SDR at even a modest sample rate is going to chew through that pretty quick depending on what decimation settings youre using in the SDR software. i run a similar setup with an SDRplay RSP1A and had to drop my sample rate way down and use the network compression in SDR-Console to make it bearable. something like 500kHz bandwidth instead of the full thing.

the IRLP node on top of that i would honestly separate completely onto its own machine or at least its own network interface if you can. mixing VOIP audio latency sensitive stuff with already compressed ham audio is just asking for trouble. i tried something similar and the echo cancellation alone was a nightmare to sort out. get the remote rig stable first then bolt on the linking stuff.

RemoteHams has been rock solid for me for basic rig control but i never bothered with the SDR panadapter over the same connection, always seemed like overkill for casual operating. if youre mostly doing HF work the 7300s built in waterfall over the CAT interface is probably good enough anyway. the latency thing on DSL is usually more about jitter than raw bandwidth in my experience, ran into the same headache on a vacation rental setup once and switching the audio codec from PCM to something like Opus made a noticable difference. worth poking around in the RCForb settings if you havent already.