so ive been going back and forth on this for a couple months now. i have a station at home, IC-7300 and a decent dipole up about 35 feet, and i want to be able to run it from work or when im traveling. right now i just VNC into a windows box and run the rig through that but the latency is pretty rough especially on SSB and forget about any fast CW.

a buddy of mine keeps telling me to look at RemoteHams because it supposedly handles the audio buffering better and theres less tearing on the waterfall compared to just screenshotting the SDR display over VNC. i did mess around with the SDR remote side of RemoteHams once or twice but never got it fully configured - i think i had a port forwarding issue or something because the server kept dropping.

my actual question is, for guys who have done both approaches, is RemoteHams actually noticeably better in practice or is it one of those things that sounds better on paper? also curious whether anyone has used it for linking into a local repeater system via IRLP or AllStar because i keep seeing people mention internet linking in the same breath as remote control and im not totally sure if those are even related or if im mixing things up

yeah they're kind of related but not really the same thing. internet linking like IRLP or AllStar is more about connecting repeaters together over the internet so you can have a QSO that hops from your local machine to some repeater across the country. remote station control is you sitting at a keyboard actually operating your HF rig from a distance. both use the internet obviously but the use case is pretty different.

as for RemoteHams vs rolling your own thing - i ran a homebrew setup for about a year using a Raspberry Pi, some custom audio routing through PulseAudio, and TeamViewer before i finally just caved and tried RemoteHams properly. the audio codec they use is noticeably better for voice, theres way less of that choppy garbled thing you get when the pipe gets narrow. the waterfall on the SDR remote client is actually rendered client-side so youre not pushing pixels over the connection, which is probably why your buddy says it looks better. that was a big deal for me when i was running SDRplay RSP1A feeds.

the port forwarding thing is annoying, i ran into the same wall. make sure you've got the right TCP port open and that your router isnt doing anything weird with NAT loopback if youre testing from inside your own network, that bit me for like two weekends before i figured it out.

honestly i tried RemoteHams a while back and it was fine but i eventually went back to a simpler setup just because i didnt want another service dependency. if RemoteHams has a bad day, your station has a bad day. with your own VPN and direct connection youre only dependent on your own hardware.

latency on CW is a real problem no matter what you use though, thats more about round-trip time to your QTH than anything the software can fix. i gave up trying to do serious CW remotely and just do digital and SSB which are way more forgiving. js8call over remote works surprisingly well actually.