so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just poking around on aircraft, some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg and the occasional AM broadcast band listening. its been fun and all but i keep running into the noise floor limitations and the dynamic range is just kind of rough especially when theres a strong local FM station nearby that seems to bleed into everything.

been looking at upgrading and the two options ive been going back and forth on are the SDRplay RSP1A and the HackRF One. price difference is significant obviously, HackRF is like 3x the cost depending where you get it. i know the HackRF can transmit which is a feature but honestly im not sure i need that right now, i mostly just want cleaner receive performance. the RSP1A specs look really good on paper, 1kHz to 2GHz coverage, 12-bit ADC vs the 8-bit on the RTL-SDR, and SDRuno seems pretty mature as software goes.

anyone running either of these day to day? curious if the RSP1A actually delivers on the receive improvement or if im just going to be disappointed again. also wondering about SDRangel vs SDRuno — ive heard SDRangel works with basically everything but the UI is kind of overwhelming at first

had the RSP1A for a couple years and its a solid step up from the rtl-sdr dongles, no question. the noise floor improvement is real and noticeable, especially if you do any HF work — the built in presets for different bands actually help a lot. SDRuno is fine but i eventually switched to SDRangel for most things because i like having all my devices in one place. the learning curve on SDRangel is real though, took me a weekend of just clicking around before stuff made sense.

HackRF is a different beast. if you dont need TX dont pay for it. the RSP1A receive performance is actually better than HackRF in most practical situations anyway because the HackRF ADC resolution isnt great either, its only 8-bit. the RSP1A at 12-bit just gives you more headroom to work with when you have strong signals nearby. for what you're describing — ACARS, weather sats, general monitoring — the RSP1A is the right tool.

i went HackRF mostly because i wanted to do some spectrum painting and mess around with replay attacks on my own garage door opener just to see how it worked, so the TX capability mattered to me. but honestly for pure receive work the RSP1A wins and costs less. thats kind of the whole story there.

one thing nobody talks about enough is the software side mattering as much as the hardware. i was getting mediocre results with everything until i started using proper decimation settings in SDRangel and actually paid attention to the gain staging. sdr++ is also worth trying, its lighter weight than SDRangel and the UI actually makes sense right away. runs great on a pi 4 too if thats relevant to your setup