so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and its been great for getting into the hobby, been using SDR# mostly and messing around with dump1090 for aircraft stuff. but im starting to feel like the dongle is holding me back a bit, especially on HF where the direct sampling mode is kinda mediocre at best. noise floor is just not great and i keep reading that a proper SDR makes a huge difference there.

been looking at either the SDRplay RSP1A or just jumping straight to a HackRF One. the price gap is real though — RSP1A is like $120ish and the HackRF is pushing $300-350 for a decent one (or like $120 for a clone but i dunno how much i trust those). main thing im trying to figure out is whether the HackRF transmit capability is actually useful for a ham or if its more of a SDR experimenter thing. i have my tech license and studying for general so TX below 30mhz isnt happening for me yet anyway but still thinking ahead.

mostly interested in HF shortwave, maybe some satellite stuff down the road, and just general wideband monitoring. dont really have a specific project in mind, which is maybe the wrong reason to spend more money but here we are. anyone gone through this same upgrade path?

went through almost exactly this a couple years back. the RSP1A is genuinely a big step up from the dongle for HF work — the noise figure is way better and having proper 12-bit ADC instead of 8-bit makes a noticeable difference when youre trying to dig weak signals out of the noise. SDRuno works fine with it, though i actually prefer running it in SDR# with the SDRplay ExtIO plugin, feels more familiar.

the HackRF is a different animal. its a great device but the receive performance is honestly not as good as the RSP1A — wider bandwidth and TX capability but worse noise floor. so if youre primarily a listener which it sounds like you are, the RSP1A is probably the better choice for what you described. the HackRF makes more sense if you want to do things like replay attacks or transmit test signals or get into the whole GNU Radio experimentation side of things. for just monitoring HF and satellites the SDRplay wins on pure receive quality at that price point.

one thing worth mentioning — for satellite work you might want to look at the RSP1A with a good LNA anyway because even the better SDRs benefit from one for weak sat signals. the SDRplay suites well into SDR++ now too which is a much better piece of software than SDRuno imo.

hackrf clone from aliexpress actually works fine for most stuff fwiw, been running one for 8 months no issues. but yeah if you mainly want to listen and not transmit the RSP1A makes more sense, the hackrf receive side is not its strong suit compared to dedicated rx-only units.