so ive been messing with an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly just scanning the local repeaters and doing some airband listening and honestly its been fine for that stuff. but i keep reading about the SDRplay units and wondering if theres actually a noticeable difference or if its one of those things where the specs look better on paper but in practice you cant really tell

my main use case is HF monitoring, im licensed general class and want to start actually receiving some shortwave stuff, maybe do some weak signal work eventually. i know the RTL-SDR does HF through direct sampling mode and ive tried it but it feels kind of deaf compared to what people describe. running SDR# on windows and tried GQRX on the laptop too. antenna is just a random wire out the window right now which i know is part of the problem

anyway is the RSP1B actually worth like $130 or whatever it is now or should i just get a better antenna first and stick with the dongle for a while. not trying to receive CW contests or anything crazy just want better HF coverage

honest answer — fix the antenna first. i ran an RTL-SDR on HF for ages and once i put up even a halfway decent random wire with a 9:1 unun the difference was night and day. the direct sampling mode on the v3 is genuinely not bad for what it is, it just needs signal to work with

that said i did eventually get an RSP1A a couple years back and yeah the dynamic range improvement is real, especially if you're anywhere near AM broadcast stations or have a noisy RF environment. the ADC in the SDRplay units is just better. but if your noise floor is already wrecked by a crappy antenna youre not gonna hear the difference between the two radios anyway. so wire first, then upgrade the SDR if you still feel like youre missing something

i went straight to a HackRF when i got into SDR and honestly looking back probably overkill for just monitoring. the RSP1B is probably the sweet spot for general HF listening if you want to step up from an RTL dongle. what software are you running, because SDR# with the right plugins makes a pretty big difference on HF too — the noise reduction stuff in there is actually decent