so ive been running a small remote station at my parents place about 60 miles out since last spring and the whole thing has been kind of a mess honestly. right now im using a combination of TeamViewer to control the logging software and a cheap IP power strip to reboot things when they lock up, which happens more than i'd like. the actual radio control is going through a homebrew serial-over-IP thing i cobbled together from a forum post i found years ago and i genuinely dont remember how it works anymore which is a problem.

anyway a guy at my local club keeps pushing me toward RemoteHams and says their SDR remote stuff is actually pretty solid now for HF. ive looked at the website and it seems like they have a client that handles audio, CAT control, the whole thing in one package. but i cant tell from the docs whether it plays nice with WSJT-X or if you have to use their own logging interface. that would be a dealbreaker for me since most of what i do is FT8 and JS8Call these days.

also curious if anyone has used their internet linking stuff for connecting to a remote receiver that isnt your own station — like using someone elses node or whatever they call it. i saw something in their docs about a network of shared receivers but couldnt figure out if thats still active or just abandoned vaporware at this point.

my latency to the remote site is usually around 25-35ms which i figure should be fine for data modes but im not sure about SSB if i ever want to do that. the audio compression they use apparently matters a lot for voice quality based on some old threads i found but those posts were from like 2016 so who knows.

been running RemoteHams for about two years now, the RCForb client specifically. it does work with WSJT-X but you have to set up a virtual audio cable and a virtual COM port to make the CAT stuff work through it — VAC or VB-Audio and a null modem emulator like com0com. its not plug and play by any stretch but once its configured it does stay up pretty reliably. i wrote down every step the second time i set it up because the first time i had no idea what i'd done to make it work.

the SDR side, i havent used that as much because my remote rig is an IC-7300 and i mostly just run it through the normal radio control path. but a friend of mine uses their panadapter integration and says its decent for monitoring the band while operating. 25-35ms should be totally fine for FT8, ive run it at higher latency than that without issues. SSB is workable too at that latency, a little floaty feeling but not bad.

the shared receiver network — honestly i think parts of it are still active but its kind of hit or miss whether a given node is online. its more of a community thing where people volunteer their receivers. worth poking around in the client to see whats showing up live.

your homebrew serial over IP setup — is that basically just a ser2net or socat thing? because if it is, i would just document it now before you forget even more of it lol. i had the same situation with a remote i set up during covid and by the time something broke i had zero memory of why i'd made certain choices. ended up just rebuilding the whole thing with a Raspberry Pi running RemoteHams server software and a dedicated audio interface and that actually simplified everything a lot compared to what i had before.

one thing i'll say is that if youre doing FT8 remotely the timing has to be solid, like the clock sync at the remote site matters more than latency honestly. make sure you have chrony or something keeping NTP tight on whatever computer is out there or youll have decode issues that are really hard to track down because they look like RF problems.