so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a mix of SDR-control and some custom scripts i cobbled together, basically a raspberry pi handling the CAT control and audio routing over the internet to my home shack while the radio sits at a rural property about 40 miles out. works okay most of the time but the latency spikes are killing me on CW and i keep having to babysit the connection.

anyway a buddy at the club keeps telling me to just switch to RemoteHams and be done with it, says the RCForb client handles a lot of the stuff im manually managing and the server software is more stable than whatever frankenstein setup ive got. but i also see people talking about the RemoteHams SDR remote side of things and im a bit confused whether thats a totally separate thing or if it integrates with the regular remote station control stuff. like can you use it as an SDR panadapter while also doing full TX control through the same interface, or is that two different subscriptions or whatever.

also curious if anyone has used this stuff for any kind of internet linking, ive got an echolink node at the same rural site and was wondering if there was any way to tie that into the remote setup so i could at least monitor the local repeater activity while im remoted in on HF. probably a dumb idea but just thinking out loud.

ran both actually. built my own thing first with a combination of hamlib, darkice for audio, and a VPN back to the shack - honestly it worked fine for SSB but yeah CW was rough anytime my ISP burped. switched to RemoteHams about a year ago and the difference in audio handling is pretty noticeable, they do some compression and buffering that smooths out a lot of the latency variance. RCForb client isnt the prettiest software but it gets the job done and the CAT passthrough for my 7300 just worked without a lot of fiddling.

the SDR remote part is kind of a different animal - its more for putting up a receiver node that other people can tune around, like a public or club-accessible SDR. you can run both on the same machine but theyre configured separately. i dont think theres a clean integration where youre doing TX through one interface and watching a panadapter from the other at the same time, at least not out of the box. might depend on your radio though, if your rig outputs IQ data you might be able to get a panadapter going on the client side through RCForb itself.

the echolink thing i have no idea, never tried mixing VoIP linking with a remote HF setup, sounds like a rabbit hole honestly.

the latency on CW is always gonna be a problem with internet remote, doesnt matter what software you use if your path has jitter. i use RemoteHams at my club's remote site and its solid for phone and digital but i basically gave up on serious CW contesting through it. if your rural site has a decent fiber connection you might do better than i do but over cable or anything shared you're just at the mercy of the network.

one thing worth looking at is whether you can set the audio buffer lower in RCForb, default settings are pretty conservative and if your connection is actually stable you can tighten it up quite a bit. made a real difference for me on faster exchanges.