so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly for airband and some NOAA weather stuff and honestly its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel the limits especially when i try to do anything below about 25 MHz without the direct sampling hack which kind of works but kind of doesnt depending on the day

anyway ive been going back and forth between picking up a HackRF One or an RSP1A for a while now. the HackRF is appealing because you can transmit on it which could be useful for some experiments but the receive performance on the HackRF is honestly not that impressive from what ive read, like the noise figure is pretty bad compared to the RSP1A. the SDRplay seems way better for pure receive stuff especially on HF which is most of what i want to do

main use case would be HF monitoring, maybe some utility stuff, possibly decoding some weak signal digital modes with WSJT-X or fldigi piped through. not really doing any transmit experiments anytime soon so maybe the HackRF is overkill in the wrong direction if that makes sense. anyone gone through this decision or have both?

had both at the same time for about 6 months. sold the HackRF. for receive only work especially HF the RSP1A isnt even close, the HackRF noise floor is noticeably worse and you really feel it on weak signals. the RSPdx is even better if you can stretch the budget but the RSP1A is already a huge step up from the rtl dongle on shortwave stuff

SDRuno works fine with it and if you dont like SDRuno you can run it through SDR# or even CubicSDR with the right driver setup. i mostly run mine with HDSDR and a VAC pipe into fldigi for utility monitoring and it works great. the direct sampling workaround on the v3 dongle always felt like a compromise to me and it is, the RSP1A just handles HF properly with actual frontend filtering

only gripe is SDRplay's linux support has been a bit uneven over the years but its gotten better. if youre on windows you wont have any issues

yeah i went through basically this exact thing last winter. ended up with the RSP1A and havent looked back for receive. the HackRF transmit capability sounds cool until you realize what you actually need an SDR for day to day, which is listening. if you ever do want to experiment with transmit down the road a LimeSDR might be worth a look too but thats a whole other rabbit hole and the price reflects it

one thing nobody mentioned -- SDRAngel is worth trying with the RSP1A if you havent seen it, does a lot more than SDR# out of the box and has some decent decoding built in for various modes. little rough around the edges UI wise but functional