so ive been trying to get my remote station dialed in for about three weeks now and im losing my mind a little bit. the setup is an IC-7300 at my home QTH, running RemoteHams RCForb server, and im connecting from work or wherever with the client. works great for like the first 3-4 minutes and then the audio just cuts out completely. PTT still seems to respond, the frequency display updates, everything else looks alive but no audio either direction.

my internet at the shack end is comcast, pretty stable, around 200 down 20 up. the client side varies. tried it on my home wifi at the remote end and same thing happens so its not a weak connection issue. ive messed with the audio buffer settings in RCForb and bumped it up to 400ms which helped a tiny bit but still drops.

anyone dealt with this before? im wondering if its something with the codec or maybe a port issue thats only showing up after the initial handshake settles. or could be the router at the shack end doing something weird with long-lived UDP connections, ive heard that can happen with some consumer routers. running a Netgear Nighthawk there, nothing exotic.

also tangentially - has anyone mixed this kind of setup with something like EchoLink or AllStar linking on the same machine? i keep thinking about tying the remote into a local repeater when im mobile but not sure if thats even practical or just asking for a feedback nightmare

yeah the UDP timeout thing on consumer routers is almost certainly your culprit. a lot of those Netgears will silently kill UDP sessions after a few minutes of what it decides is inactivity, even if packets are flowing. check your router admin panel for something like "UDP connection timeout" and bump it way up, some of them default to like 30 seconds which is insane. if you cant find that setting you can also try enabling UPnP and letting RCForb negotiate the ports itself, sometimes that keeps the session alive better than static port forwarding.

i had almost the exact same thing happen with my remote FT-991A setup, different software but same symptom. ended up putting a cheap travel router flashed with DD-WRT at the shack end just so i had actual control over the NAT timeout settings. bit overkill but it fixed it completely.

on the AllStar mixing idea - technically doable but you really need to think through your audio routing carefully. if the remote RX audio and the node audio are on the same machine youre going to need a virtual audio cable app to keep things clean. ive seen people do it but usually on a dedicated mini PC not a shared desktop.

dont overlook QoS settings either. if your router is trying to be smart about traffic prioritization it can sometimes throttle what it thinks is junk UDP after the connection is established. seen that cause exactly what you describe where everything looks connected but audio is just gone.

RemoteHams has a discord or user group somewhere, might be worth posting there too since the devs are sometimes active and have seen basically every weird failure mode at this point.