so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just poking around on aircraft, some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg, and occasionally listening to P25 trunking in my area. its been fine honestly but i keep hitting the ceiling on it — the dynamic range is pretty rough when theres a strong pager transmitter nearby and the noise floor just bugs me more and more the better i understand what im looking at.

anyway been looking hard at either the HackRF One or the RSPdx from SDRplay and i cant quite figure out which way to make sense for me. the HackRF is attractive because yeah it can transmit which opens up some stuff i might want to do later, fox hunting practice setups, maybe some basic signal replay experiments in a controlled way. but from everything i read the receive performance is actually worse than the RTL in some ways? like the noise figure is pretty bad and the ADC resolution is only 8 bit which shows up when youre trying to pull weak stuff out of the noise.

the RSPdx on the other hand seems to get really good reviews for actual receive quality, the 14 bit ADC makes a noticeable difference from what people say, and the HF coverage without any upconverter is a big deal for me since i want to get into more shortwave and 160/80m monitoring. but its RX only so if i ever want to do any transmit experiments id need something else.

not sure what the right call is here. budget isnt unlimited but im not trying to cheap out either. anybody been down this road?

ran into almost the exact same decision about two years back. ended up going RSPdx and havent regretted it once. the difference vs the RTL dongle was immediately obvious, like first night i fired it up i was pulling WSPR spots on 40m that the dongle couldnt even hint at. the HF direct sampling on it is genuinely good, not just "usable" good.

the HackRF transmit capability sounds cool on paper but honestly for most of what you described i dont think youll miss it. if you want to do fox hunting transmitter stuff theres cheaper ways to handle that side of things. the HackRF receive really is mediocre, its more of a swiss army knife where all the blades are medium quality rather than one really sharp one if that makes sense. for serious monitoring work the RSPdx just walks all over it.

only thing id add is make sure youre running SDRuno or at least give it a fair shot before you jump to SDR# or whatever, the RSP hardware and SDRuno are actually pretty well integrated and some of the noise reduction stuff in there is legitimately useful not just marketing fluff.

tbh if budget allows just get both eventually lol. but if i had to pick one starting from where you are id say RSPdx too. the 8 bit thing on hackrf isnt just a spec sheet complaint, you actually feel it when a strong local signal is anywhere nearby, whole display just gets messy.

one thing nobody mentions enough — the SDRplay driver situation on Linux is way better than it used to be. used to be kind of a pain but last time i set it up on a Pi it was pretty smooth. matters if you ever want to run it headless for like a kiwisdr type monitoring setup or whatever.