so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR V3 dongle for about a year now mostly for aircraft stuff and some AM/FM scanning and honestly its been great for what it is, but im starting to get the itch to go further and actually transmit occasionally or at least have something that doesnt fall apart above 1.7 GHz

been looking at the HackRF One and the SDRplay RSP1A and im kind of torn. the HackRF obviously does TX which is huge but ive read the noise floor is pretty terrible compared to dedicated receive-only stuff. the RSP1A looks way better on paper for receive sensitivity and the RSP1A has that 1kHz to 2GHz coverage which covers basically everything i care about but it tops out around 2GHz which is fine honestly

main use cases would be decoding weather satellites (NOAA and maybe eventually meteor scatter stuff), poking around the 70cm repeaters in my area, maybe eventually doing some WSPR beacon monitoring on HF. not really in a hurry to transmit but part of me thinks i should just get the HackRF now so i have the option later

anyone actually run both and have an opinion that isnt just a youtube video trying to get affiliate clicks

I ran a HackRF for about two years before picking up an RSP2 and honestly the difference in receive quality is pretty noticeable. the HackRF noise floor is rough, especially on HF, like you'll pick stuff up but you're fighting the hardware the whole time. for pure monitoring the SDRplay gear is just in a different league

that said the TX capability on the HackRF is genuinely useful if you ever want to mess with things like replaying signals or doing any kind of RF testing — not talking about anything illegal just like testing your own gear, checking antenna patterns, that sort of thing. if you have any interest in that side of things then it kinda justifies the compromises on receive

for your use case though — weather sats, WSPR monitoring, general HF and VHF stuff — id lean RSP1A. SDRuno has gotten way better than it used to be and the hardware just performs. you can always grab a HackRF down the road if you want TX, they hold their value okay on the used market anyway

meteor scatter decoding with an RTL dongle and SDR# actually works surprisingly well if you havent tried yet, just throwing that out there. got my first MS decode last summer off a sporadic-E opening using nothing fancier than a V3 dongle and a yagi I had laying around pointed roughly northeast

anyway yeah the RSP1A is the move for receive, HackRF if you wanna do weird stuff. thats basically the whole answer lol