so ive been going back and forth on this for like three months now and i keep going in circles. basically my situation is i have a decent station at my parents place about 90 miles away — FT-991A, a decent antenna setup, the whole thing — and i want to be able to operate it from my apartment where i obviously cant put up anything worth using. the question is whether to just set up something with RemoteHams and call it done or try to roll my own thing with a VPN, maybe some SDR stuff piped through the internet.

ive played around with the RemoteHams SDR remote side of it a little bit and honestly the latency wasnt terrible for SSB but when i tried to do any CW it was pretty rough. like the timing was just slightly off enough to mess me up. not sure if thats on my end or theirs or just the nature of the beast with internet linking in general. anyone dealt with this and figured out a fix or is CW over RemoteHams just kind of a known limitation.

also kind of curious if anyone has tried mixing approaches — like using the SDR remote just for monitoring and then doing actual transmit control through something else. seemed like an idea but i have no idea if that would even work cleanly without a bunch of sync issues.

CW latency over RemoteHams is just kind of what it is honestly. i run a remote station through them for a buddy who lets me use his tower setup about 50 miles out and for phone modes its totally fine, great even. but i stopped trying to do CW through it after maybe two sessions. the round trip just kills the feel of it. what ive seen some people do is run a separate keyer at the remote end that handles the actual timing locally — like you send the dit/dah commands over the control link and the keyer at the station end does the actual timing. RemoteHams does have something for this i think but ive never messed with it myself.

on the rolling your own question — its totally doable but you end up spending a LOT of time on stuff that isnt radio. port forwarding, VPN configs, dealing with whatever weird routing your parents ISP does. if you just want to operate its probably not worth the headache unless you really enjoy that kind of systems admin stuff.

yeah the hybrid approach you're describing is actually something i tried for a while — SDR receiver running through one path just so i could have a wideband view of whats going on, and then the actual transceiver control going through a separate RRC-1258 link. it kinda works but honestly the sync between what youre hearing on the SDR feed versus whats actually happening on the rig gets annoying fast. theres enough delay difference between the two streams that you end up confused more than helped. i eventually just ditched the SDR monitor and stuck with the native audio from the RemoteHams link and it was fine for what i was doing which is mostly casual HF, ragchews and a little bit of digital.