so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now doing mostly airband and some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg and it works fine for what it is but ive been wanting to get into more serious HF monitoring, like shortwave broadcasts, some utility stuff, maybe WSPR decoding just to see whats bouncing around. someone at the club mentioned the RSP1A and honestly the price jump isnt that crazy but i dunno if its actually worth it or if im just gonna end up with the same frustrations i have now.

main thing i notice with the RTL-SDR on HF using the direct sampling mode is just how noisy everything feels. like i can hear stuff but its buried and i find myself cranking gain until its a mess. running SDR# on windows and ive tried SDR++ which i actually like better but same hardware limitations obviously. does the RSP1A genuinely clean things up that much or is a chunk of that just my antenna situation. running a random wire out the window which i know isnt ideal.

also curious if anyone has tried running SDRangel with either of these, i messed with it briefly and got confused by the interface but maybe im missing something

the RSP1A is a pretty decent jump for HF honestly. the direct sampling hack on the RTL is always gonna be a compromise, theres just a lot of noise getting in because the dongle wasnt designed for it. the RSP1A has actual front end filtering and a proper ADC for those frequencies so yeah you will notice a difference especially on the lower HF bands.

that said your random wire is doing a lot of work against you. ive run both and with a bad antenna the RSP1A still picks up all the local garbage you'd expect. if you can get even a basic end fed halfwave up with a decent choke at the feedpoint youll probably be more impressed by the upgrade. i run mine with SDR++ now and its pretty solid, SDRangel is powerful but the UI genuinely takes some getting used to, i gave up twice before it clicked

yeah what he said about the antenna is the real deal. i made the same jump thinking new hardware would fix everything and it helped but not as much as finally sorting out my feedline situation did. i was getting tons of noise from a cheap coax run through the house.

one thing i'll add is if you're doing WSPR decoding specifically, WSJT-X pipes in fine from either device through a virtual audio cable setup, i use VB-Audio for that. works on the RTL too if you havent tried it yet, might be worth doing before spending money just to see if the workflow even appeals to you