so ive been messing around with remote station control for about six months now and finally got a decent setup going but im curious if anyone else is running RemoteHams RCForb or the SDR remote stuff for anything beyond just casual listening. my situation is i live in an HOA nightmare so the remote shack at my dad's property about 40 miles out is basically my only option for real HF operation.

the latency isnt terrible on a good day, maybe 150-200ms round trip which is workable for SSB but CW is kinda rough unless you go full QSK and just deal with it or run a keyer at the remote end. i set up a Raspberry Pi out there running a bunch of stuff and the audio path is actually the part that gives me the most headache — the codec settings in RCForb are a bit buried and i never quite know if im optimizing them or just making things worse.

also thinking about tying in some IRLP or Echolink nodes for VHF/UHF linking through the same internet connection out there but not sure if that's going to create a bandwidth nightmare or if it's actually fine in practice. anyone done both at the same site? the upload at that location is only about 15 Mbps which should be plenty but i've been surprised before.

yeah 15 up should be more than enough honestly, IRLP and echolink dont use much at all, were talking maybe 8-12 kbps for a connected node in codec2 or GSM mode. the bigger issue you might hit is if the Pi is trying to do too many things at once — audio routing for RCForb, the node software, maybe some CAT control or logging stuff, it can get jittery. i'd almost suggest separating the node onto a cheap second Pi just to keep things clean.

on the CW thing — i moved my keyer to the remote end a while back and that solved basically everything. running the paddles locally and sending keystrokes over the internet is just asking for trouble. if you haven't done that yet its worth the afternoon to set up, made the whole thing way more usable for me at least.

i tried something similar a couple years back with a different remote software and honestly the SDR side of it was what impressed me most — being able to just grab a slice of spectrum and look at whats happening before you transmit is kind of a game changer when youre doing this remotely and cant just walk over and check the antenna or whatever. my setup never got fully stable but that was more a networking issue on my end than anything with the software itself i think.

one thing i'll say is make sure whatever router is out at your dad's place supports proper QoS if you do add the linking node. nothing worse than your echolink audio eating your rig's audio path during a pileup lol