so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly doing aircraft and some wideband scanning, and i want to step up to something that actually covers HF properly without the whole upconverter thing. been looking at the SDRplay RSP1C and the HackRF One and i cant really decide. the price gap isnt huge but its not nothing either.

main thing i want to do is just sit on 40m and 80m in the evenings, monitor some utility stuff on shortwave, maybe poke at WSPR a bit. not doing any transmitting. the HackRF does TX but i dont really care about that right now. from what ive read the SDRplay has better sensitivity on HF but the HackRF has like way more bandwidth which sounds cool but also i dont know if i actually need 20 MHz of spectrum at once for what im doing.

anyone running either of these with SDRuno or SDR++ that can give me a real world take? not the spec sheet stuff, i can read that myself. more like does it actually work the way you expect or are there weird gotchas

had a HackRF for a couple years and honestly for pure HF listening the SDRplay just destroys it. the HackRF is a pretty mediocre receiver, it was designed as a dev tool more than a serious monitoring rig. noise floor on HF is noticeably worse and you'll see spurs that arent real signals if youre not careful. that said if you ever want to do anything with transmit side testing or need that wide bandwidth for like spectrum analysis type stuff its kind of unbeatable for the money.

for what you described, 40m 80m evenings and some shortwave utility, get the RSP1C. SDRuno is a bit clunky but SDR++ works great with it and the drivers are solid on windows and linux both. sensitivity difference on HF is not subtle, its obvious within like 10 minutes of comparing them side by side.

yeah what he said basically. i went RTL -> HackRF -> RSP2 and the jump from hackrf to sdrplay felt bigger than rtl to hackrf did on HF. the RSP2 has the extra antenna ports which i use for a separate loop antenna on MW/LW but for just HF the RSP1C is probably fine and saves you some money. WSPR decoding with it and WSJT-X or even just fldigi works pretty painlessly once you sort the virtual audio cable stuff out. that part is always kind of annoying no matter what radio you use tbh