so ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now and finally got something that mostly works but im curious if anyone else is running RemoteHams with an actual SDR on the back end rather than a traditional transceiver. my setup right now is a RPi4 feeding a RSPdx into the RemoteHams client software and it mostly works but the latency is kind of killing me on CW especially when i try to do anything above like 18wpm. i know thats partly just the nature of internet linking but i was wondering if anyone had tuned the buffer settings or found a sweet spot with audio codec settings that helps.

the other thing is i keep losing the connection randomly, not sure if its my home router dropping the UDP or something on the RemoteHams server side. ive got decent upload speed at the shack end, around 35mbps, so i dont think its bandwidth. just feels flakey sometimes especially late at night which is kind of ironic because thats when i actually have time to operate.

anyway if you're running something similar or have compared this to like, just doing RDP into a shack PC running HDSDR or whatever, id love to hear how that compares. the RemoteHams approach seems more purpose built but im not sure if its actually better in practice for SDR use specifically.

yeah ive been running a similar thing for about 8 months, RSP1A not the RSPdx but close enough. the latency on CW is just kind of what it is unless you're on a really clean low-latency path, i gave up trying to fix it and just slowed down a bit. what did help me was switching from the default opus settings to a lower bitrate and smaller frame size, i think i landed on 20ms frames and it felt a little tighter. not perfect but better.

the random drops though - check if your router is doing any kind of UDP flood protection or rate limiting. mine was silently dropping packets after a certain threshold and it took me forever to figure out because nothing in the logs was obvious about it. once i whitelisted the RemoteHams ports it got way more stable. also worth checking if your ISP does anything weird with UDP at night, some of them throttle or do traffic shaping during peak hours which is counterintuitive but ive seen it happen.

i havent tried the pure RDP approach for a while but honestly i think RemoteHams is better tuned for the audio side of things. RDP audio is just not great for receiver audio, it does weird compression artifacts on SSB that drive me nuts.

the internet linking side of this is where it gets complicated imo. ive played with a few different remote setups and honestly the SDR backend question depends a lot on what you're trying to do - if you just want to listen and maybe do some light digital modes the RSPdx over RemoteHams is totally workable. but if you want to actually transmit youre obviously into different territory and the SDR only gets you so far before you need a proper TX chain behind it.

i ended up going a different direction and just running a IC-7300 at the remote end with a dedicated PC and using the RemoteHams traditional transceiver path, latency is still there but at least the TX side is clean. the SDR experiment was fun though, for monitoring purposes its actually really nice because you get the wide panadapter view and can watch the band remotely which a single VFO rig doesnt give you the same way.