so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now using RemoteHams and overall its pretty solid but CW is just basically unusable for me at certain times of day. the latency swings wildly, like sometimes its totally fine and i can work a pileup no problem and then other times its 300-400ms and im just making a fool of myself. both ends are on decent fiber so i dont think its a bandwidth issue per se.

the SDR side of things is actually what im most curious about - im running an SDRplay RSPdx as the RX front end and feeding it into the remote software. the receive audio quality is genuinely great when everything is working, way better than i expected honestly. but the transmit timing when keying through the internet just feels like gambling. i saw somewhere that there's a way to do local sidetone buffering to at least make it feel more consistent on your end even if the actual transmitted signal is still at the mercy of the connection, has anyone actually got that working in RemoteHams specifically?

also curious if anyone has experimented with using something like EchoLink or IRLP alongside this kind of setup for linking to a repeater for local net check-ins when youre away from home. seems like it might be redundant but i know some guys run multiple systems.

the latency thing with CW over RemoteHams is a known annoyance. what helped me was setting the audio buffer on the client side as low as it would go without constant dropouts - took some trial and error. also make sure youre not running the SDR sample rate higher than you need because that adds processing delay at the server end. i run mine at the lowest rate that still gives me a usable passband and it helped noticeably.

the sidetone buffering you mentioned - yeah thats in the client settings, theres a local sidetone option that generates the tone on your machine independently of the roundtrip. it doesnt fix the actual transmitted timing but at least you stop second guessing yourself mid-QSO. for serious CW contesting though honestly remote just isnt ideal, the guys who do it well usually have very low latency dedicated links not just regular consumer fiber.

yeah the EchoLink question is a different thing entirely really. i mean you could run both but theyre kind of solving different problems. EchoLink and IRLP are for voice linking into the repeater network, whereas what youre doing with RemoteHams is controlling your actual HF station. i use AllStarLink on a separate node at the same QTH as my remote rig and they dont really interfere with each other, just runs on a little raspberry pi. handy for checking into the local 2m net when im traveling without hauling a radio.