so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just listening around on SDR# and occasionally poking at ADSB stuff with dump1090. works fine honestly but i keep reading people saying the SDRplay RSP1A is a massive step up and worth the extra $120 or whatever it is now.

my main uses are just general HF listening through a upconverter, watching the 2m/70cm bands, and occasionally i try to decode some APRS or NOAA weather fax. nothing super serious. im not doing any transmitting with it obviously. the RTL noise floor has been bugging me on HF especially, even with the Ham It Up upconverter i still get some birdies and the dynamic range just feels kinda mushy compared to what people describe with better hardware.

has anyone actually done a side by side or switched from one to the other? is the SDRplay difference noticeable enough on HF that itd actually improve what im doing or am i just gonna end up with the same limitations because my antenna situation isnt great anyway. running a random wire off the back of the house right now, maybe 40 feet of it.

I made that jump about two years ago and honestly yeah the difference on HF is real. The dynamic range on the RSP1A is noticeably better — you stop getting that weird intermod garbage when a strong AM broadcast station is nearby. With the RTL and the Ham It Up I always had this kind of fuzzy noise floor and strong signals would kind of bleed into adjacent channels. The SDRplay cleaned a lot of that up.

That said your antenna is gonna limit you more than the hardware at some point. A 40 foot random wire is fine but if you havent got any kind of common mode choke or feedline filtering you might just be pulling noise in from the house wiring. I'd honestly say try to sort the antenna side a bit first, but if you can stretch the budget the RSP1A is worth it. SDRuno is a bit clunky but you can use it with SDR# or HDSDR with the right plugin and that helps a lot.

ive got both sitting on my desk right now actually, use the rtl-sdr for dedicated adsb since i dont want to tie up the sdrplay for that. on HF the difference is pretty obvious to me, the sdrplay just has way less of that overload problem when theres a strong shortwave broadcast station nearby. the 12-bit ADC vs 8-bit makes a real difference in how it handles crowded bands.

one thing nobody mentions enough is that the sdrplay has better software support in terms of being actually maintained. the drivers and sdruno keep getting updated. rtl stuff works but its kind of frozen in time developement wise. if youre into trying new dsp stuff or playing with sdrpp that works great with both anyway so maybe less of an issue. i wouldnt say the rtl is bad, its incredible for the price, but yeah once youve used something with real dynamic range its hard to go back to HF on the dongle