so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now, mostly just poking around on aircraft, some weather sat stuff, and occasional HF with the direct sampling mod. works fine honestly but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1A for a while and cant decide if its worth the jump.

main thing im curious about is the noise floor difference on HF. my RTL-SDR is... okay i guess, but anything below 10 MHz is pretty rough even with a decent antenna. im running SDR# right now and tried SDRuno briefly when i borrowed a friends unit at a hamfest. the software felt heavier but the receive quality on 40m was noticeably better, like i could actually pull out signals that were just mush on the dongle.

anyone gone through this upgrade path and have thoughts? also curious if SDRuno is the only real option for the RSP series or if people are using HDSDR or something else with it. i know gqrx works on linux but im on windows so that doesnt really apply

made that exact jump about 18 months ago and yeah the HF difference is real. the RTL-SDR direct sampling mode is kind of a hack and it shows, you're losing a lot of dynamic range and the front end just wasnt designed for it. the RSP1A has proper filtering and a much wider IF bandwidth which makes a huge difference when the band is busy.

as for software you dont have to use SDRuno, i actually run mine in HDSDR with the ExtIO DLL that SDRplay provides and it works great. some people prefer it because HDSDR is a bit more lightweight. SDRuno has gotten better over the years but it does eat RAM. if youre doing HF monitoring seriously the RSP1A is worth it, just dont expect miracles if your antenna situation is rough because that matters more than anything else at those frequencies

honestly i skipped the RSP1A and went straight to a HackRF and kind of regret it for receive-only work. the HackRF is 8-bit ADC and the RSP1A is 14-bit i think, so for weak signal monitoring the SDRplay stuff is going to walk all over it. HackRF is great if you need to transmit or do wideband stuff but for just listening on HF its not the best tool. i still use mine for certain things but if your use case is just monitoring and decoding i wouldnt necessarily go that direction