so ive been running a remote station for about two years now, started with just a Raspberry Pi and some custom scripts to control my IC-7300 over the internet, which worked ok but was a constant pain to maintain. lately ive been looking at RemoteHams because a buddy of mine swears by it for his station out in the boonies where he cant be there often.

the thing im trying to wrap my head around is how the SDR side of RemoteHams actually integrates with existing hardware. like if i already have a real radio at the far end do i even need the SDR component or is that kind of a separate thing they bolt on. the documentation honestly isnt super clear on this and i dont want to pay for a subscription tier that doesnt do what i think it does.

also curious about the latency situation — my home QTH has decent fiber but the remote site is on a fixed wireless link, probably 15-20ms one way. for SSB phone that should be ok but im wondering if CW ops find that annoying or if theres some buffer you can tweak. anybody running this over anything worse than that?

and one more thing, the internet linking aspect — does RemoteHams handle the NAT traversal on its own or do i still need to mess with port forwarding on both ends. that was my biggest headache with the DIY setup honestly.

the SDR piece in RemoteHams is kind of optional depending on how you set it up. if you have a real radio with a CAT interface at the remote end you configure that as the primary control path and the SDR part is more of a panadapter/monitoring thing rather than the actual transmit path. at least thats how mine works — IC-9700 at the remote end, RCForb client on my laptop here, and i have an SDRplay hanging off the same machine for the bandscope view. they dont really talk to each other natively but its workable.

on the NAT thing yes it does handle traversal through their relay servers, you dont need open ports which was honestly the thing that sold me on it over just running VNC plus some audio bridge. the relay adds a tiny bit of overhead but for SSB you really wont notice. CW i find anything under 50ms round trip is fine for me but some guys are more sensitive to it than i am.

been using RemoteHams for almost a year, came from the hamradiodeluxe remote thing which was a disaster for me. the latency on fixed wireless should be totally fine, ive operated through a Starlink connection at a friend's place and even the jitter wasnt that bad once you set the audio buffer a bit higher than default. there's a slider in the client for it, dont leave it on auto if your link isnt rock solid.

honestly my only gripe is when they have server issues the whole thing just dies and theres not always great communication about it. had a contest weekend where i lost the connection for like three hours and couldnt do anything. with a DIY setup at least you can reboot stuff remotely or figure out whats wrong. so there's a tradeoff. but for casual operating and not wanting to babysit the setup all the time its pretty solid.