so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just scanning around, listening to some aircraft stuff on 1090 MHz, poking at NOAA weather sats when i remember to set up the antenna. overall its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel the limits of it, especially on HF where the noise floor just seems to eat everything alive even with the direct sampling mod.

anyway im trying to decide if i should step up to the SDRplay RSP1A or just bite the bullet and go HackRF. the price difference is pretty significant obviously — RSP1A is around $110 and the HackRF clone is like $50 but a real one is over $300. i mostly want better HF receive, maybe some weak signal stuff on VHF, not really planning on doing transmit at all so the HackRF TX capability feels like wasted money for my use case. SDRuno seems decent from what i've read but ive been happy in SDR# so not sure i want to switch software either. anyone gone through this same decision?

went through almost the exact same thing last year. ended up with the RSP1A and honestly its a pretty solid jump from the v3 dongle, especially on HF — the preselection filters actually make a noticeable difference and you're not getting that LW/MW broadcast bleed everywhere. noise floor is meaningfully lower. i run it in SDRuno mostly but you can use it in SDR# with a plugin, its a bit fiddly to set up but works fine once you get it going.

if youre not transmitting the HackRF is genuinely overkill and the ADC resolution on it is only 8-bit anyway which is actually worse than the RSP1A for pure receive sensitivity. people forget that. the HackRF is great if you need wide tuning range and TX for stuff like replay attacks or testing, but for just listening the SDRplay wins for the money in my opinion. theres also the RSPdx if you want to go a step further on HF specifically but thats another jump in price.

dont sleep on just getting a good upconverter for the RTL-SDR before spending more money — i ran an Ham It Up for like 6 months and it actually helped a lot on HF. but yeah if you already tried direct sampling and youre not happy then the RSP1A is probably the right move, the HackRF for receive-only use is kind of silly unless you specifically need to go above 6 GHz or whatever it tops out at.