so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly doing HF with the direct sampling mod and running SDR# and occasionally SDRangel when i feel like fighting with it. honestly for what i paid its been great but im starting to feel the limits of it especially on the lower bands, lots of spurious stuff and the noise floor is noticeably worse than what guys are posting screenshots of with proper SDR receivers.

been looking at the SDRplay RSP1B, its sitting around $130 or so depending where you find it. the RSP1 series has been around long enough that i trust the hardware wont just die on me, and RSPdx looked interesting but thats more money than i want to spend right now. my main use case is just HF listening, some 40m and 80m late at night, shortwave broadcast when theres anything left worth hearing, and occasionally poking around on 630m just to see whats there.

main question i guess is whether the RSP1B is actually going to feel like an upgrade or if im chasing something that wont matter much with my antenna situation (end fed halfwave, not great, mediocre feedline). anybody gone that path or should i just get a HackRF and call it a day for the extra flexibility even though i know the sensitivity isnt as good

the RSP1B will absolutely feel like an upgrade over the rtl-sdr on HF, that's not even close. the direct sampling mod on the RTL dongles is kind of a hack and it shows — the noise figure is rough and the dynamic range suffers when you've got strong signals anywhere nearby. the RSP1B has proper front end filtering and better ADC dynamic range, you'll notice it almost immediately if you're doing serious HF listening.

that said, your antenna is going to matter more than the radio once you get past a certain baseline. if your feedline is lossy or your EFHW isn't tuned well you're going to hit that ceiling regardless. i'd say get the RSP1B, spend an afternoon in SDRuno which is clunky but works fine once you learn it, and then if you still feel limited look at the antenna side before blaming the radio. the HackRF comparison is kind of apples and oranges — hackrf is a transmit-capable SDR platform which is cool but its receive sensitivity is genuinely worse than the RSP1B, its a different tool for different things.

i had almost the exact same setup before i moved to an RSPdx and yeah the difference on 80m especially was pretty obvious. less garbage in the waterfall, pulling out weaker signals that just got buried before. SDRuno took me a bit to get used to coming from SDR# but its fine now. dont bother with hackrf for pure receive its not what its designed for