so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now doing mostly wideband monitoring, some ATIS decoding, poking around on the aircraft bands, occasional HF with the direct sampling hack. its been fine honestly, like way better than i expected for a $30 piece of hardware. but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B for a while and cant decide if its actually worth the jump or if im just GASing.

the thing that gets me is the noise floor on the RTL below like 50 MHz is pretty rough even with the bias tee and a decent preamp inline. and the direct sampling mode works but its not exactly clean, you can tell its a workaround. the RSP1B is what, 12 bit ADC vs the 8 bit on the RTL so that should make a real difference on dynamic range right? at least thats what i keep reading.

anybody actually made this switch and noticed a real improvement in day to day use? im running SDR++ mostly now because SDRsharp got annoying with the plugin stuff and SDR++ just works. does the RSP1B play nice with it or do you have to fight drivers

made that exact switch about 18 months ago and yeah the difference on HF is pretty noticeable, not like night and day dramatic but the noise floor is definitely cleaner and you stop getting the intermod garbage you get on the RTL when theres a strong broadcast station nearby. the 10 MHz coverage at once thing is nice too if you do any spectrum monitoring.

SDR++ works fine with it, you just install the SDRplay API separately and then it shows up in the source dropdown. took me maybe 10 minutes total including driver install on windows. the SDRplay SDRuno software is okay but honestly SDR++ is just better for general use so i dont even bother with it anymore. only time i use SDRuno is when i want to use the IF bandwidth settings that SDR++ doesnt expose.

if you're doing a lot of HF the upgrade is worth it imo. if you're mostly VHF/UHF you might not notice as much since the RTL is actually pretty decent up there.

honestly depends what you're trying to do with it. I went the other direction and got a HackRF instead of the SDRplay because I wanted TX capability for testing and the 1MHz to 6GHz range was useful for some stuff I was messing with. but if you're purely a receiver the HackRF is actually worse than both on noise floor, like noticeably so, the ADC resolution just isnt there for serious weak signal work.

the RSP1B is probably the right call for what you're describing. just dont expect it to replace a proper communications receiver or anything, its still an SDR with all that implies. the selectivity ahead of the ADC matters a lot and none of these cheap SDRs have real front end filtering like a dedicated rig does.