so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now using RemoteHams and overall its been pretty solid for digital modes and CW but SSB is just painful sometimes. the latency is sitting around 180-220ms depending on the time of day and i know thats not terrible for internet linking but when youre trying to have a normal QSO it feels like youre talking over a satellite phone from 1998.

my setup is a K3 at the remote end feeding into RemoteHams through a fairly decent upstream connection - fiber on that end, cable modem on my end. ive played with the buffer settings and i can get it lower but then the audio starts breaking up especially if anything else is touching the network. the SDR side of things is actually pretty nice once you get the panoramic display working right, i can see the whole band segment which is great for finding activity.

what i really want to know is if anyone has found a sweet spot for buffer vs latency that doesnt completely destroy SSB audio quality. or if theres some QoS trick on the router at the remote end that actually makes a difference. ive read conflicting stuff about this and im not sure what actually works vs what people just think works.

yeah the latency thing with SSB over RemoteHams is kind of a known pain. i went through the same thing with my remote up at the cabin. what ended up helping me was setting QoS on the remote router to prioritize UDP traffic on the ports RemoteHams uses - i think it was somewhere in the 40000s range but check the docs, i dont remember exactly. also made sure nothing else was scheduled to run on that connection during my operating time, like backups or updates.

honestly though 180ms is kind of the floor you're going to hit depending on physical distance. if the remote site is more than say 500-600 miles away geographically the propagation alone adds up. i moved my server to a VPS closer to the actual radio hardware and shaved off maybe 30-40ms which actually did help more than i expected on SSB. still not like sitting in front of the rig but workable for ragchews. contests forget it, i do those local.

the SDR panoramic thing is genuinely the best part of that whole setup imo. i barely even use the remote for transmitting anymore, mostly just sit there watching the waterfall while im at work which is probably not what my employer wants me doing but here we are.

on the latency question - i never found a magic fix, just kind of accepted it and started doing a mental adjustment like you do when you're working DX through a pileup and everything is a half beat off anyway. probably not the helpful answer you wanted but i think there's a ceiling with RemoteHams specifically vs something like webSDR or even running your own RCForb setup where you have more control over the codec.