so ive been down this rabbit hole for about three weeks now and honestly im more confused than when i started. heres the situation - i have a station at my in-laws property about 40 miles out, got a IC-7300 out there and a decent antenna setup (80-10m fan dipole, nothing fancy), and im trying to figure out the best way to run it remotely over the internet.

ive looked at RemoteHams and the RCForb client and it seems pretty solid from what i can tell, the latency on audio wasnt terrible when i tried somebody elses shared station just to test the feel of it. but then part of me wonders if i should just go the SDR route and stick an SDRplay RSPdx or something out there with sdruno or sdrconsole running as a server. the downside obviously is id lose transmit capability unless i bolt on some kind of separate TX control which starts getting complicated fast.

the other thing im looking at is whether internet linking via something like AllStarLink or even just straight VOIP makes sense as a fallback for the audio path if the main connection gets flaky. the property has only DSL out there, maybe 10-15 mbps down but upload is probably 3-4 mbps which should be enough i think.

has anyone actually run RemoteHams long term with a real transceiver (not just SDR passthrough) and is the rig control reliable enough that you trust it for like actual dx work, not just casual ragchewing? thats really the core question i guess.

been running rcforb with a 7300 for probably two years now, the rig control is solid as long as your connection doesnt drop obviously. the CI-V stuff over the network has never really given me grief. biggest issue i had early on was audio codec choices - the default settings were chewing up more bandwidth than i needed and once i dialed back to one of the lower bitrate codecs the DSL situation got way more manageable. you wont notice much difference on SSB voice honestly.

for DX work i do get on there for real contacts, not just testing. the latency adds maybe 150-200ms round trip depending on conditions and you do notice it slightly when tuning but it's not a dealbreaker. i wouldnt try to do CW at anything above like 18-20wpm remotely over that kind of link though, timing just goes a bit mushy. if you care about CW seriously that might matter.

the SDR-only approach for receive monitoring is great but yeah youre right that bolting on separate TX is a pain. i tried that briefly with a raspberry pi running hamlib and some relay board and it worked but it felt kludgy compared to having rcforb just handle everything cleanly.

the allstarlink fallback idea is interesting but i think youre mixing two different things together there. allstar is really for linking repeaters and nodes, using it as a fallback audio path for HF remote operation would be kind of roundabout. like youd basically be going HF audio -> allstar node -> back to you which adds more latency and another failure point. i get what youre thinking but probably not worth the complexity unless you already have an allstar node deployed for other reasons.

3-4mbps upload at the remote end is fine for this btw, rcforb doesnt need much at all.