So ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a usable remote station going at my parents place about 200 miles away. The SDR side of things actually works pretty decently, im using an SDRplay RSP1A feeding into the remote client and i can hear stuff fine. The problem is when i switch over to actually transmitting through the rig (857D with a raspberry pi running the server software) the latency on SSB just makes it basically unusable. Like im talking 600-800ms round trip sometimes and people just talk over you constantly because the timing is so off.

Ive tried tweaking the audio buffer settings in the RHC software and it helps a little but not enough to really have a normal QSO. The internet connection at that end is only about 15mbps down / 5 up so that might just be the limiting factor here. Wondering if anyone has gotten SSB remoting to work well over a mediocre connection like that or if im just asking too much from the setup. Digital modes and CW seem totally fine by the way, its really just SSB voice thats painful.

Also curious if anyone has tried linking the remote into an Allstar node or something similar for local access when the internet is being flaky, seems like it could be a useful fallback but not sure if thats even practical.

yeah 5mbps upload is probably your main problem honestly. RemoteHams needs more headroom than you'd think especially if the audio codec isnt compressing aggressively enough. try forcing the codec down to something like 8kHz mono if you havent already, theres a setting buried in the server config for this. it wont sound as nice but the latency drops significantly in my experience. i run a similar setup over a 10/3 connection at my cabin and had to basically sacrifice audio quality to get timing acceptable for SSB ragchews.

the allstar idea is interesting but i dont think it really solves the latency problem since youre still going through internet at some point, it just changes where the bottleneck is. unless you mean like a completely separate VHF/UHF link as a backup path, which actually could work if you have a repeater in range of both locations.

800ms is rough for sure. I spent like two weekends fighting basically this exact thing last winter. What ended up helping me more than any software tweak was switching the pi to a wired ethernet connection instead of wifi - dropped my jitter way down even though the raw speed didnt change much. Jitter kills SSB worse than raw latency imo because at least with consistent delay you can kind of mentally compensate, but when its bouncing around 400ms to 800ms randomly it just sounds like youre stepping on everyone.

Also check if the pi is doing anything else in the background, i had mine also running a little weather station script and it was causing cpu spikes that showed up as audio dropouts on the remote end. Wasnt obvious at all until i monitored the cpu usage while someone was trying to talk to me.