so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and honestly its been great for learning but im starting to feel the limits, mostly on HF where the direct sampling mode is okay but not really great for anything serious. been looking at either grabbing a HackRF One or stepping up to an SDRplay RSP1A and i cant really decide if the price jump from the HackRF to the RSP1A is worth it for what i want to do

mostly i want to do better HF monitoring, maybe some airband, and eventually i want to play with decoding some of the utility stuff like weatherfax and maybe WSPR reception just to see how my antenna is doing. i dont do transmitting so the HackRF's TX capability is kinda wasted on me but the frequency range is appealing. the RSP1A has way better dynamic range from what ive read and the 14-bit ADC vs the HackRF's 8-bit is apparently a big deal on crowded bands

anyone actually run both or switched from one to the other? SDR# and SDRuno both seem fine from what ive seen on youtube but i spend most of my time in SDR++ now anyway so software isnt really the issue. just trying to figure out if the RSP1A is actually noticeably better in practice or if its one of those things where the specs look great on paper but in real use its not that different

had both at the same time for a while actually. the 8-bit ADC on the HackRF is a real limitation once you start doing any serious HF work, especially if you're anywhere near a strong broadcast station or have local RFI. the RSP1A just handles adjacent strong signals so much better, less IMD products showing up all over the place. on VHF and UHF the gap is smaller but on HF it really does matter in practice not just on paper

the other thing nobody really talks about is the HackRF's noise figure is pretty rough compared to the RSP1A, like 25dB NF or something which is fine for strong signal stuff but for weak signal work on HF youre fighting yourself. RSP1A is much cleaner. if you dont need TX just get the RSP1A, the HackRF's transmit is also pretty dirty without filtering anyway so its not like its a great standalone TX solution either

yeah what he said about the dynamic range is accurate in my experience. i went RTL-SDR -> RSP1A and never really felt the need to go HackRF since i wasnt doing any transmitting experiments. SDR++ works great with the RSP1A too, the sdrplay driver integration is solid these days, had some issues a couple years ago but thats been sorted out for a while now. WSPR decoding with WSJT-X piped through a virtual audio cable works fine once you get the levels right, thats probably an afternoon of fiddling the first time but nothing terrible