so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now mostly doing aircraft and some weak signal stuff and honestly its been fine for what it is but i keep reading about the RSP1B and wondering if its actually worth the jump in price or if im just falling for gear acquisition syndrome again

my main use case is HF monitoring, some 40m and 80m band listening when im not actually transmitting, and occasionally trying to decode some WSPR signals which the RTL-SDR handles ok with the direct sampling hack but its obviously not ideal. i run SDR# mostly but ive been experimenting with SDRuno and CubicSDR on the linux machine

the dynamic range thing is what keeps coming up when i read about the RSP1B and i genuinely dont know if my antenna situation is good enough to even expose the difference — running a 40m dipole at maybe 25 feet, coax into a nooelec balun, nothing fancy. would i even notice the improvement or is this one of those things where you need a really clean setup to see the benefit

honest answer — yes you'll notice it on HF, but maybe not as much as the specs suggest if your antenna situation has any nearby noise sources. the direct sampling mode on the RTL-SDR is pretty rough, like it works but you're dealing with a lot of spurious stuff and the dynamic range is just not there when a strong broadcast station is nearby

i ran an RSP1A for a couple years before it got replaced and the difference on 40m at night with all the broadcast QRM was pretty significant, SDRuno helps too because it integrates properly with the RSP hardware. that said if you're mostly doing casual listening and WSPR decoding the RTL-SDR plus an upconverter like the ham-it-up might actually get you more bang for your buck and you keep the flexibility of using whatever software you want

the RSP1B added the notch filters for MW and FM broadcast which is actually genuinely useful if you're anywhere near a strong FM station, my old RSP1A would get crushed by the 100kw FM station about 8 miles from me

i went RTL-SDR to HackRF and kind of skipped the SDRplay stuff entirely, different use case i know since the HackRF does TX too but just my experience — the jump from the dongle to something with proper front end filtering is real and noticeable, especially below 30 mhz where the cheap dongle is just sort of doing its best

if you're staying receive-only the RSP lineup is probaly the smarter call over HackRF anyway since the receive performance is actually better and you dont pay for transmit capability you wont use. gqrx on linux works fine with SDRplay stuff through the sdrplay driver plugin for gnu radio, took me a bit to get working but its solid once its set up