so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a pretty cobbled together setup - basically a raspberry pi running some custom scripts, a SignaLink for audio, and RigControl over VPN back to my home QTH. works fine but its a pain to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird the whole thing falls apart and i have to drive out there to reset stuff.

a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just switch to RemoteHams and be done with it, says the client software is actually pretty solid now and they've added SDR support which i didnt know about. the SDR remote piece is interesting to me because i have an SDRplay sitting around doing nothing and it would be cool to use it as a panadapter on the remote end so i can see whats going on without having to guess.

my main concern is latency and the audio codec situation. right now i have the audio tuned pretty well for SSB and CW but when i tried echolink-style internet linking a few years back the latency was always kind of annoying for actual back-and-forth QSOs. does RemoteHams handle that better or is it still kind of the same deal where you just learn to live with it

also wondering if anyone has tried linking a remote station into a local repeater setup over the internet, like using something like AllStar or IRLP on one end and the remote HF rig on the other. probably a weird use case but i was thinking about it

ive done both actually and honestly the homegrown VPN setup is more flexible but RemoteHams is just... less drama. the client has gotten better, the SDR piece works if your upstream bandwidth is decent - i run an RSP1A on the remote end and just use it as a pan adapter like you said, works great for that. latency on the audio is still a thing, its not magic, but the codec they use now is noticeably better than older versions. for CW i find i have to add a little pause before key-up anyway just from habit.

the repeater linking thing is kind of its own rabbit hole. ive seen guys run AllStar nodes at the remote site and then connect them back, but mixing HF remote with VHF linking gets complicated fast especially if you care about control op regs. might be worth keeping those two things separate unless you have a specific reason to combine them.

the latency question really depends on your path more than the software tbh. i ran RemoteHams through a hotel wifi once and it was basically unusable, but from home with a decent connection to a site 200 miles away it felt pretty natural after a few minutes. you kind of adapt. SSB is forgiving but yeah CW you notice it.

one thing i'll say is the SDR remote integration is still a bit rough around the edges in my experience - had some issues with the waterfall dropping out during heavy band activity, not sure if thats a bandwidth thing or something on their end. worth trying though, especially since you already have the SDRplay sitting there doing nothing