so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now and honestly its been great for what it is, got me into the whole SDR rabbit hole. been doing some aircraft stuff, some NOAA weather sat decoding, occasionally poke around the HF bands with a long wire and the direct sampling mod. works well enough but im starting to feel the limits of the noise floor and the dynamic range is pretty rough when theres anything strong nearby.

so now im looking at either jumping to a HackRF One or going with the SDRplay RSP1B. the price difference isnt huge, hackrf runs around 300-350 for a clone or 400ish for the real Great Scott Gadgets one, RSP1B is like 100-120. but obviously theyre pretty different things. HackRF can transmit which is appealing even though i dont really have a use case for it right now, and it covers a ridiculous range. RSP1B seems like it would just be a straight up better receiver though, 12-bit vs 8-bit, better sensitivity, the RSP series has a decent reputation.

mostly i want better HF performance and cleaner reception overall. not planning to do any serious transmitting with SDR, i have my FT-991A for that. anyone been down this road? is the RSP1B just the obvious choice here or am i missing something about the HackRF

RSP1B is the obvious answer if you just want to receive better. the HackRF is a neat toy but the ADC resolution is genuinely worse than the SDRplay and it shows on HF especially. ive got both and the RSP1A i had before (basically same receiver as the 1B) wiped the floor with the HackRF for anything below 30 MHz. strong station nearby? the HackRF gets stomped, you'll see IMD artifacts all over the place without good filtering in front of it.

that said, the HackRF transmit capability is cool for things like signal gen work, testing stuff, poking at digital modes in a lab kind of setup. but if youre just monitoring and doing sat stuff and HF, save the money and get the RSP. you'll also want to try SDRuno which is SDRplays own software, its a bit of a resource hog but the IF filtering and the noise reduction stuff actually works. SDR++ works great with it too if you want something lighter.

yeah what he said basically but i'll add — dont sleep on the RTL-SDR v3 for satellite stuff still. i run an RSP1B alongside a v3 and honestly for NOAA and Meteor-M the v3 with a decent LNA up at the antenna does fine. the RSP really earns its keep on HF and crowded bands where you need that dynamic range headroom.

one thing nobody mentions much is the SDRplay has actual hardware notch filters built in which is really nice if you live near an AM broadcast tower like i do. kills it before it ever hits the ADC. the RTL dongles just fall apart in that scenario no matter what software you throw at it