so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and i cant really make up my mind. currently running an RTL-SDR v3 with SDR# and its fine for most stuff but i keep hitting the noise floor on HF and the 8-bit dynamic range is just killing me when theres a strong broadcast station nearby wiping out everything else

the HackRF is tempting because of the TX capability even though i know its only half duplex and the noise figure is pretty rough, something like 25dB i think without an LNA in front of it. but the frequency coverage is insane, like 1MHz all the way up to 6GHz which would be great for the satellite stuff i want to play with

the RSP1B from SDRplay on the other hand has much better dynamic range, 14-bit ADC i believe, and the noise floor is way lower but its RX only obviously. i mostly want to do NOAA/Meteor-M passes, some aircraft monitoring, and maybe poke around at some of the amateur satellites. do i actually need TX for any of that? probably not right now but i feel like ill want it eventually

anyone run both and can actually compare them from real use rather than just spec sheets

had the HackRF for about 3 years before i picked up an RSP1A and honestly for pure receive the SDRplay walks all over it. the HackRF is great if you genuinely need that TX side for things like replay attacks in security research or want to transmit WSPR on HF without digging out a proper rig, but for monitoring its kind of mediocre. you really do need a decent LNA up front to get anything useful out of it on the lower bands

for your satellite stuff the SDRplay is going to be noticeably better. meteor scatter decoding on Meteor-M2 i went from maybe 60% of a pass being decodable with the RTL dongle to getting nearly complete images with the RSP1A. the SDRuno software that comes with it is a bit clunky but it works, and you can use it with SDR# or CubicSDR or pretty much anything via the API anyway

only thing id say is if theres even a small chance you want to actually transmit anything in the future, grab the HackRF and just put a cheap LNA4ALL or similar in front of it and accept the slightly worse rx performance. if youre pretty sure its receive only work for the foreseeable future, get the SDRplay, youll be happier day to day with it

for the NOAA and meteor M2 passes an rtl-sdr with a decent QFH or turnstile antenna honestly does fine, just saying dont sleep on what you already have. i was getting pretty clean meteor images before i upgraded anything. the bigger difference for me was the antenna not the dongle

that said i do run an RSP2 now and the two antenna ports plus the MW/HF coverage without an upconverter is really nice. the notch filters help a lot near broadcast stations which sounds like your actual problem