so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for a while now and honestly its been pretty great for VHF/UHF stuff, ADS-B, decoding NOAA weather sats, all that. but lately ive been wanting to dig into HF more and the direct sampling mode on the v3 is just... not great. its functional but the noise floor is pretty rough and i keep reading that the SDRplay RSP1C is a significant step up for HF work.

my question is basically whether the jump from like $30 to $130 or whatever the RSP1C goes for now is actually noticeable in real use or if im just going to be disappointed because my antenna situation isnt good enough to see the difference anyway. running a random wire out the back window right now, maybe 40 feet, not a great ground. i use SDR# and HDSDR mostly, occasionally mess around with SDR-Console.

not really interested in the HackRF for now since i dont need the transmit side and the receive performance always gets knocked in comparisons. unless im wrong about that and someone has a different take. anyway curious what people who have actually owned both think rather than just spec sheet comparisons

had both on my bench at the same time for a few months so can give you a pretty direct answer. the RSP1C is genuinely better on HF, not marginally better, noticeably better. the dynamic range improvement is real and you'll hear it pretty quickly if you tune around 40m or 80m in the evening when theirs a lot of signals crammed in there. the RTL in direct sampling mode is doing something heroic just to work at all down there and it shows.

that said your antenna is probably your bigger bottleneck right now. 40 feet of random wire out a window with no real ground is going to limit both receivers. i ran a similar setup and upgrading to even a basic end-fed with a decent choke balun made more difference than swapping the SDR hardware did. if i had to choose one upgrade id probably do the antenna first and then save for the RSP1C. if you can do both obviously do both but the RSP1C on a mediocre antenna will still be better than the rtl dongle on the same antenna, just maybe not $100 better if the antenna is really limiting things

also SDRuno which ships with the RSP1C is actually pretty solid now, i was skeptical but ive been using it more than SDR# lately for HF work

your take on the hackrf is mostly right for receive-only use. its fine but the noise figure isnt anything special and for just listening theres no real reason to pay that premium. where it shines is if you get into anything that needs wideband TX, portapack stuff, signal replay, that kind of thing. for HF DX listening its overkill in the wrong direction lol

i jumped from rtl dongle to the RSP1C about two years ago and didnt regret it but i also did my antenna work first so hard to say exactly how much was the radio vs the antenna