so ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now and started with just RigControl and a VPN back to my home QTH but its gotten kind of janky and i keep having audio dropout issues that i cant quite pin down, either its the latency from my ISP or something weird with the codec settings, i honestly dont know

anyway a buddy of mine at the club keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and be done with it, says the SDR remote integration is pretty slick and you can actually see the spectrum while you're operating which honestly sounds really useful for weak signal stuff on 6m when conditions are sketchy

my question is basically - has anyone who's actually used RemoteHams for a while compared it to a more DIY approach? im running an IC-7300 at home and a pretty solid fiber connection on both ends so theoretically the infrastructure should be fine, i just wonder if the RemoteHams client handles the audio pipeline better than what ive cobbled together

also curious about the internet linking side of it, i know some guys use it to tie in to their club station remotely and i could see doing that but i dont fully understand how that interacts with the SDR piece if you're also running like an SDRplay or something alongside the main radio

yeah i ran a DIY setup for a while, hamachi VPN, flrig, and a bunch of duct tape essentially, and eventually just gave up and moved to RemoteHams probably two years ago now. the audio is way more consistent in my experience, they use opus codec by default and you can tweak the bitrate depending on your link quality which helps a lot if your upstream isnt great

the SDR integration is decent but i'll be honest it depends on what you're trying to do. if you just want a panadapter view while operating the 7300 remotely it works fine, but i've had some weirdness trying to get the SDRplay synchronized with control commands especially when band conditions are changing fast and youre retuning a lot. not a dealbreaker just something to be aware of

for club station remote access the permission and scheduling stuff in RemoteHams is actually pretty well thought out, trustees can set time slots and power limits per user which is exactly what you want so someone doesnt accidentally park a kilowatt on a frequency and walk away

the latency thing you mentioned with your current setup is probably the codec more than your ISP honestly. most DIY remote setups default to something uncompressed or use way too high a buffer setting. i spent like three weekends chasing what i thought was an ISP problem and it turned out i just had the jitter buffer cranked up way too high in my audio config

havent used RemoteHams myself but from what ive seen demoed at Field Day the spectrum display is genuinely useful, way better than trying to mentally picture whats happening on the band when you cant hear the background noise the same way you would sitting in front of the rig