so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, started with just RCForb talking to my IC-7300 at home but then I got curious about the SDR side of things and whether I could basically replace the radio with an SDR backend and still have something usable for actual contacts not just listening

the RemoteHams client is... okay i guess, it works, but im running into this thing where the audio latency is all over the place depending on what my upstream is doing. I'm on a 25 meg cable connection at the shack end and that should be plenty but some afternoons it just falls apart. the PTT delay gets bad enough that I keep clipping the first syllable of every transmission and people are asking me if my mic is broken

the bigger question I have is whether anyone has tried bridging a RemoteHams node into like an Allstar or IRLP network for some kind of hybrid setup. I know that sounds weird but I have a friend who runs a linked repeater system and we were talking about whether you could pull audio off a remote HF station and feed it into a node somehow. mostly just spitballing at this point but curious if anyone has actually thought this through or tried it

the latency thing with RemoteHams is real and honestly it comes down to the server side buffering settings more than your connection speed. there's a jitter buffer config in the server software that defaults to something way too conservative, i dropped mine down and the PTT clipping basically went away. you'll find it in the audio settings tab, not exactly obvious where it is

on the Allstar bridge idea - i mean technically you could do it, app_rpt can take pretty much any audio source if you're willing to get dirty with the asterisk config. the issue is you'd be adding another encoding stage on top of whatever RemoteHams is already doing to the audio so by the time it comes out the other end on an RF link it's gonna sound pretty rough. for HF especially where you're already dealing with fading and noise that extra codec hit might not matter much but for anything SSB it kind of kills intelligibility. i tried something similar with an SDRplay RSPdx feeding into a VOIP chain and it was technically working but the audio was just not great

yeah the hybrid remote/linking idea comes up every now and then and it never quite works out as clean as you'd hope. the timing issues alone are a pain - HF remote already has inherent delay and when you stack internet linking on top you start getting feedback loops or people just talking over each other because nobody can tell when the channel is clear

what are you actually trying to accomplish with it? if it's just so your friend can monitor your HF remote from his linked system there might be simpler ways to do that