so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 with the direct sampling mod for a while now, mostly just listening to HF, some shortwave utility stuff, checking out the 40m band when im not on the air. it works ok but the dynamic range is pretty rough when there's a strong local AM broadcast station a few hundred kHz away and it just kind of blobs out everything near it.

been looking at the RSP1A as an upgrade, the 14-bit ADC and better front end filtering sounds like it would help a lot with that. but im also wondering if i should just save up more and look at the HackRF instead even though i know that's more of a transmit-capable thing and not really optimized for receive. i mostly just want cleaner HF reception, some medium wave DX on nights when the band's good, maybe decode some digimodes off the air passively.

anybody gone from RTL-SDR to RSP1A and actually noticed a real difference in a noisy RF environment? my QTH is suburban so there's a fair amount of crud on the lower bands. running SDR# right now but ive been messing with SDRuno a bit since that's what the RSP stuff uses natively.

yeah the jump from RTL-SDR to RSP1A is pretty noticeable especially on HF. the direct sampling hack on the dongle is clever but you're fighting against a chip that was never designed for that and it shows. the RSP1A's front end is just cleaner, better selectivity, and the 14-bit dynamic range means strong local broadcasters don't trash everything around them nearly as bad.

that said if your main issue is the AM broadcast splatter you might also want to look at adding a simple high-pass filter on the RTL before spending money on new hardware. sometimes a cheap FM trap or a broadcast band reject filter from nooelec can clean things up more than you'd expect. ive seen setups where that alone made the dongle usable on 40m.

but honestly if you're spending real time on HF monitoring the RSP1A is worth it. SDRuno is a bit quirky at first but once you get the IF gain and reference level set right it does well. dont bother with HackRF for pure receive, the noise floor on that thing isn't great, it's more of a transmit/research tool.

i made that exact switch about a year ago and yeah it's a noticeable difference. not like night and day on every band but on the lower HF stuff especially 160 and 80 meters the RTL was basically useless from my place, too much intermod from a 50kW AM station about 8 miles away. RSP1A handled it way better once i dialed in the gain settings in SDRuno.

one thing nobody told me is SDRuno has kind of a steep learning curve compared to SDR#, took me a while to figure out the whole RSP control panel / virtual radio setup. theres good youtube tutorials though. also HDSDR works with the RSP1A if you install the extio plugin and honestly i ended up going back to that for a while just because i knew the interface already.