so ive been trying to get a proper remote station setup going for about three months now and im pretty much at my wits end with it. background: i have a IC-7300 at my QTH out in the country where i actually have decent antenna real estate, and i want to operate from my apartment in the city. fiber at both ends so bandwidth isnt really the issue.

been using RemoteHams to do the actual control and audio bridging, and it mostly works but the latency is driving me nuts especially on SSB. its like talking through one of those old satellite phone calls where you keep stepping on the other person. CW is actually totally fine and i can deal with that but SSB just feels wrong. the audio codec they use, im not sure what settings people run it at - i have it on the default and maybe thats the problem.

also looked at pairing this with an SDR receiver running in parallel so i can have a proper waterfall at the remote end without hammering the control link. has anyone done like a RemoteHams + SDR combo where the sdr handles the rx display and the 7300 handles the actual tx? curious if thats even worth the complexity or if there's a cleaner way to do this. the whole internet linking side of it is honestly what confuses me most, like how people route everything through a VPN vs just letting RemoteHams handle the connection natively.

the latency thing on SSB is pretty normal with RemoteHams honestly, it's not zero and you kind of have to adjust your operating style a little. what helped me was lowering the audio quality setting a bit - counterintuitive but it reduces the buffer size and actually tightens up the round trip. also check what server you're routed through, sometimes it bounces you through a node that's geographically dumb for your situation.

on the SDR idea - yeah i do exactly this. running an RSPdx hanging off a splitter before the rig, and i just run SDRuno separately over a VNC session on the shack PC. it adds some complexity but having a real waterfall makes a huge difference for finding signals and spotting what's going on in the band. the control bandwidth for RemoteHams is pretty modest so the SDR stream doesnt really fight with it as long as you're not trying to stream 2MHz of IQ data or something. i keep my SDR bandwidth down to like 200kHz and it's fine over a decent connection.

VPN vs native RemoteHams connection - i just use their native stuff and it works. never felt the need to add a VPN layer on top, seems like extra hops to me unless you have a specific security reason.

yeah the SDR combo thing is actually pretty slick once you get it dialed in. I went through something similar with a remote setup I maintain for a club, we have an Anan on one end and an RSP1A basically just for the panadapter view at the remote side. took a while to get the freq tracking synced up so the SDR waterfall actually reflects where the rig is tuned but there are scripts floating around that handle that.

one thing i'll throw out there - have you considered just going full SDR remote instead? like WebSDR or OpenWebRX if you want receive-only, or something like the Hermes-Lite 2 which you can run with a remote frontend and it's basically a native network radio. not saying RemoteHams is wrong for your situation, especially if you already own the 7300, just that there's a point where the hybrid approach gets complicated enough that a cleaner architecture might be less headache. though honestly if CW is working fine you might just accept that SSB remote is always gonna feel a little off and live with it.