so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a pretty decent station at home - ic-7300, a decent 40m dipole, and a small tribander up about 35 feet - and im trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely when im traveling for work. been looking at RemoteHams and also just kinda hacking something together with a raspberry pi and maybe ham radio deluxe over a VPN.

the RemoteHams SDR remote thing is interesting to me because it apparently lets you share the station with other operators too which could offset some costs i guess. but i dont totally understand how the audio routing works over their system vs just doing a direct RDP or VNC session to a shack PC. anyone actually running one of these setups day to day, like actually using it for real QSOs not just testing it once and forgetting about it?

also seen some mention of internet linking stuff like maybe tying this into an Allstar node or something but im not sure thats even the same category of thing. just trying to figure out where to start honestly.

yeah i ran a RemoteHams setup for about two years at my old QTH before i moved. the audio latency is actually pretty manageable once you dial in your buffer settings, and the SDR remote piece is kinda nice because you get a waterfall even if your rig doesnt natively do that over the network. the tricky part for me was always the CAT control - sometimes the virtual com port stuff would get flaky after a reboot and id have to remote desktop in just to reset the software anyway which kind of defeats the purpose.

the sharing part is real though, i had a few guys using my station when i wasnt on it and they were pretty respectful. you set up access levels so nobody can just key up without you approving them. i think the bigger headache is your upload bandwidth - if youre on a typical cable connection the upstream is going to limit how clean the audio sounds to whoever is connecting in. i was pushing 3-5 mbps upload most of the time and it was fine for SSB, FT8 obviously doesnt care at all.

Allstar is really a different thing, thats more for linking repeaters and doing EchoLink type stuff, not really for controlling an HF station remotely. people conflate them but the use case is pretty different.

im just gonna say the pi VPN route is more work up front but you own the whole thing end to end which matters to me. RemoteHams is fine but its another service that could just go away someday or change their pricing. i had a buddy who had his whole workflow built around a comercial remote service and when they had a server outage he couldnt get into his own station at all for like 3 days which is just silly.

the 7300 does work pretty well over a direct connection with something like SDR# or even the native Icom RS-BA1 software, latency is the main enemy and you kinda just learn to live with a half second or so of delay. for contests its rough but for casual DX hunting its totally workable once you get used to it.