so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for a few months now and finally got a semi-stable setup going with a pi and some audio over the network. works okay but its kind of a pain to maintain and every time i update something it breaks something else. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and be done with it but i dunno, feels like giving up control i guess.

anyway the main thing i actually want to do is run some SDR remotely - i have an SDRplay RSP1A sitting at the remote site and i want to be able to hit it from home or wherever. i know RemoteHams has the SDR remote stuff built in but i havent really dug into how well it actually works in practice. like is the latency tolerable for actual operating or is it more of a just-listening-to-broadcast kind of situation. also curious if anyone has tried using it as sort of an internet link node alongside regular phone operation, seemed like there was some crossover there but i might be misreading the docs.

the remote site has decent upload, maybe 20-25 Mbps so bandwidth shouldnt be a huge issue i think

ive been running a RemoteHams setup for about two years, mostly on HF with an IC-7300 and it honestly just works most of the time. the SDR remote piece is hit or miss depending on what youre trying to do with it - for just monitoring a chunk of spectrum and tuning around its totally fine, latency is noticeable but not terrible once you get used to it. i think i measured it somewhere around 150-200ms round trip on a good day which is fine for CW if youre patient and pretty workable for SSB.

where it gets annoying is if you're trying to do anything that depends on tight timing or if the connection hiccups. had a few QSOs where the other station thought i was having audio issues and it was just the buffering doing weird stuff. with 20-25 up at your site youre not going to have bandwidth problems, that's way more than you need. the client side is where it can choke if youre on something flaky.

dont really know much about the internet linking angle you mentioned, thats kind of a different world to me

yeah the rolling your own thing is kind of a rabbit hole, i went down it for almost a year before caving and just using a combination of RemoteHams for the control layer and keeping my own audio routing. hybrid approach i guess. the SDR piece specifically - i actually run SDR-Console server at the remote end and connect to that directly rather than going through RemoteHams for the SDR part, just seemed cleaner to me and the waterfall rendering is better locally than trying to push it over their interface. two different connections to the same site basically but it works.

the internet linking question is interesting, i think you might be thinking of how some guys tie their remote into an Echolink node or something like that? i've seen a few setups where the remote rig doubles as a link radio for a repeater system. its doable but you start getting into audio path nightmares real quick if youre not careful about what goes where