so ive been messing around with remote station control for about six months now and finally got a somewhat stable setup going. running a IC-7300 at the home QTH tied into RemoteHams with a RRC-1258 and it mostly works but im trying to figure out if the SDR remote side is worth adding into the mix.

the idea was to have the wide panadapter view available when im operating from the laptop at work or wherever, because honestly controlling the rig blind without a spectrum display kind of drives me nuts especially on 40m when its busy. i saw a few posts from like 2019 talking about integrating an SDRplay or RTL dongle on the server side and piping that through but the info is pretty old and i dont know if the current RemoteHams client even handles that cleanly anymore.

also curious if anyone has daisy-chained any kind of internet linking into this - i have a buddy in VK land who wants to be able to hit my station remotely too and we were throwing around the idea of using something like AllStar or even just direct RRC linking but two hops of internet audio seems like it would just be a latency disaster on SSB. maybe ok for CW? not sure. anyway if anyone has actually deployed something like this in the last year or two would love to hear what actually works versus what looks good on paper.

yeah i ran almost exactly this setup for about two years, IC-7300 with RRC and a RSP1A hanging off the same antenna feedpoint through a splitter. the SDR side in RemoteHams does work but its kind of clunky - the panadapter integration depends heavily on which client version youre running and i found the Windows client handled it better than anything else, the Android app basically ignores it. latency on the SDR stream was actually tolerable for just watching the band, maybe 1-2 seconds behind real time which for spotting purposes is fine but you wouldnt want to use it for split operation or anything reactive.

the two-hop thing for your VK friend i would be more cautious about. did it once for a Field Day demo situation and the round trip audio was just painful on phone, every syllable felt underwater. CW was actually ok surprisingly, like the timing smeared a little but it was still copyable. if hes just wanting to operate CW from your station it might be worth a try but id set expectations low for SSB.

the latency question on double-hop internet audio is real and it kinda depends more on where everyones internet routing goes than anything you can control. i did some testing with echolink bridged through a remote rig once just as an experiment and even domestically the round trip on SSB was enough to cause that weird talk-over thing where nobody knows whose turn it is. not a deal breaker for CW like the other guy said but for a VK path youre probably looking at 300-400ms minimum just from geography and thats before any audio codec buffering adds on top.

one thing worth looking at is whether you could just give your VK buddy direct RRC credentials to your server and cut out the middle hop entirely, though obviously that means trusting him with access to your station which is its own conversation. also make sure your upload bandwidth at home is solid, that was the thing that bit me hardest when i first set up remote, i had great download but my upload was like 5 meg and audio would just fall apart when anything else was using the connection.