so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 with an upconverter for HF stuff for about a year now and honestly its been pretty decent for what it is. but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B and wondering if the jump in performance is actually noticeable in day to day use or if im just GASing out and should put that money toward a better antenna instead.

main thing i care about is being able to actually dig stuff out on 40m and 80m at night when the bands are busy and the noise floor gets ugly. the RTL-SDR with direct sampling mode is fine but i can tell it gets a bit wobbly when theres strong signals nearby, had a local AM broadcast station wiping out a chunk of the band the other night which was annoying. heard the RSP1B has better filtering and a proper 14 bit ADC which should help with that but i honestly dont fully understand how much of a real world difference 8 bit vs 14 bit actually makes in a crowded band situation.

running SDR++ on a slightly older laptop, nothing special. would the RSP1B even be usable or would it choke the CPU? anyone actually switched from RTL-SDR to SDRplay and have opinions either way?

the dynamic range difference is real, not just spec sheet stuff. when i switched from rtl-sdr direct sampling to an RSP1 a few years back the first thing i noticed was that AM broadcast problem basically went away. the RTL chip just doesnt have enough dynamic range to handle a strong signal a few hundred kHz away without it messing up everything around it, the RSP handles that way better because of the better ADC and the frontend filtering they put in there.

that said honestly if your antenna situation isnt great the improvement is going to be less dramatic than you expect. i upgraded my antenna around the same time so its hard to fully separate the two but i suspect the antenna made as much difference as the SDR on the noisier bands. if you can swing both do both, if its one or the other i'd probably do antenna first unless you're in a real RF-dense environment where the overload is your main problem, in which case yeah the RSP1B will help a lot. SDR++ on a medium laptop should be totally fine, its pretty light.

i have both sitting on my desk right now actually, use the rtl-sdr for quick scanning and ADS-B stuff and the RSPdx for serious HF listening. the bit depth thing does matter way more than i thought it would going in. on a crowded 40m evening the rtl just kind of starts to fall apart with intermod and the RSP stays clean. cpu wise SDR++ handles either one fine on my machine, HackRF is actually more demanding in my experience when youre doing wideband stuff.