so ive been messing with RemoteHams for about 3 weeks now and got my base station somewhat working but theres this weird latency thing that keeps bugging me. running a IC-7300 at home with a raspberry pi handling the CAT control side, and connecting from my apartment about 40 miles away over fiber on both ends so its not like im on a slow connection.

the audio delay seems fine for just listening but when i try to actually make a contact its this awkward half second thing that throws me off completely. i know thats kind of just the nature of the beast with remote ops but i was reading about how some people pair it with an SDR on the receive side to kind of help monitor what the band is doing while the main rig handles TX, like using it as a panadapter remotely. has anyone actually done that? run like an rtl-sdr or airspy on the remote end feeding into sdrsharp or something and just dealt with having two separate streams going?

also unrelated but sort of related - does anyone use any of these setups tied into like an allstar node or echolink for the repeater side of things? my club has been talking about internet linking the local machine and i got volunteered to figure it out, which honestly i dont mind but i wanted to see what people are actually running before i just go build something random

the half second latency is pretty normal with RemoteHams, theres not a ton you can do about it without going to a lower level protocol. some guys swear by running the audio through opus at a lower bitrate which can actually reduce buffering but then you trade audio quality obviously. what helped me more than anything was just adjusting how i operate - like keying up a beat earlier and waiting a beat longer before unkeying. sounds dumb but you get used to it pretty fast.

the dual SDR thing is doable but you kinda have to manage the cpu on whatever machine is hosting everything because now youre streaming two audio/data streams back to yourself and if the host machine is just a pi 4 it can get a little wobbly under load. i tried something similar with an airspy mini feeding gqrx and it worked okay but i just ran it as a second browser tab basically and watched the waterfall while the main rig did its thing. not perfectly integrated but got the job done for checking propagation.

for allstar - look at hamvoip if you havent already, its way easier to get running than building from source and their image for the pi just works. connecting it to an existing repeater you dont own is the fun part, youll need the trustee on board obviously but the technical side is pretty approachable once youre in the portal.

yeah the allstar thing your club wants to do is honestly not that bad once you wrap your head around the node numbering and the IAX stuff. we linked our 2m machine to a statewide system about two years ago and the hardest part was just convincing the repeater trustee it wouldnt cause problems lol. technically it was like an afternoon of work.

cant really speak to the RemoteHams SDR combo question but im curious if anyone has tried that with like a WebSDR running locally on the same network as the remote station instead of a dedicated SDR instance. feels like it should work but ive never bothered to try it