so ive been messing with remote station control for a few months now and finally got a decent setup going but the RemoteHams client keeps giving me grief with audio latency. like the PTT fires fine, the rig control through the RCForb client seems solid, but theres this weird delay where i can hear myself transmitting about 300-400ms after i key up and its throwing off my timing completely especially on sideband.

my internet at the shack end is about 50 down / 10 up on a cable connection, and the remote end where the radio actually lives is on a fiber connection with way better upload. so i dont think its a bandwidth thing. ive messed with the jitter buffer settings in the audio section and lowered the codec quality to try to reduce latency but it doesnt seem to make much difference past a certain point.

also kind of unrelated but has anyone tried bridging RemoteHams into like an echolink or IRLP node? i know theyre pretty different things conceptually but im wondering if theres any scenario where internet linking and remote control could be made to work together in some useful way, like for emcomm purposes where you might want to remotely operate a linked repeater system or something. maybe thats a dumb idea, i dunno.

anyway the main thing is the audio latency if anyone has dealt with this before

the 300-400ms thing is pretty normal unfortunately with RemoteHams depending on where your servers are routing through. one thing that actually helped me was switching from the default opus codec settings to a lower bitrate but also bumping up the buffer size slightly rather than lowering it — sounds counterintuitive but it made the timing more consistent even if the absolute delay was similar. the inconsistency was what was killing me on SSB.

also check what your actual round trip time is to the RemoteHams server node you're connecting through. if you're going coast to coast or through a non-optimal route that alone can add 80-100ms before you even account for audio buffering. there's a ping display somewhere in the client, i forget exactly where but it's in there. if that number is already high then no amount of codec tweaking is gonna fix it, you'd want to look at whether there's a closer relay option or set up your own direct connection if you own both ends of the setup.

on the echolink bridging thing - honestly i never tried it but i dont see why you couldnt run both on the same remote machine, like have the radio connected to RemoteHams for your own remote access and also keyed into an echolink node independently. they'd just be sharing the same radio which could get weird. might be more trouble than its worth unless you had a really specific use case in mind.

yeah the latency thing is just kind of the price of admission with remote ops over the public internet, at least in my experience. i run a remote setup with my IC-7300 at my parents place about 200 miles away and honestly anything under 500ms i consider acceptable for casual HF work. contesting or anything timing sensitive forget it, i dont even try remotely.

the echolink/remote control hybrid idea isnt dumb at all actually, some emcomm groups do run remotely accessible linked systems but usually they build it purpose-specific rather than trying to bolt consumer remote control software onto an existing node. IRLP in particular is pretty locked down in terms of what you can run alongside it on the same machine if i remember right from when i looked into it years ago.