so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly for monitoring local repeaters, some aircraft stuff with dump1090, and just general band scanning. works fine honestly but ive been reading about the SDRplay RSPdx and people seem to really love it. the noise floor difference is apparently pretty significant especially down in the lower HF bands which is where i want to spend more time.

my current setup is the dongle into SDR# on a windows laptop, nothing fancy. ive got a decent end fed half wave outside which helps a lot vs the whip that came with it. the thing is the RSPdx is like $200 and i keep second guessing whether ill actually notice that much difference for casual listening or if im just falling into the gear acquisition trap again. anyone made this jump and regret it or not regret it? also curious if SDRuno is actually usable or if most people just run it through SDR# or HDSDR anyway

made that exact jump maybe two years ago and honestly yeah the difference on HF is real, not imagining it. the RTL-SDR is fine for VHF/UHF but once you get below 30MHz the front end just gets swamped pretty easily and the dynamic range shows its limits. i live maybe 8 miles from an AM broadcast tower and that thing would just get crushed even with a good filter, the RSPdx handles it way better. SDRuno has gotten a lot better than it used to be, i actually use it now instead of fighting with the API in other software, though i know some guys still prefer HDSDR with the ExtIO plugin for the SDRplay stuff. if youre planning to do any serious HF monitoring i think youll notice it pretty quick, if youre mostly on 2m and 440 honestly the dongle is probably fine and save your money

I went the other direction actually — had an RSP1A and ended up keeping the RTL-SDR dongles around for dedicated single-purpose stuff like having one permanently on ADS-B and another running on the weather sat frequencies. the SDRplay sits on HF. so maybe think about it less as replacing it and more like adding a better tool for a specific thing. also worth mentioning if you havent tried SDR++ yet, its cross platform and works with pretty much everything including SDRplay, way cleaner than SDR# in my opinion and the noise floor display is nicer to look at for long monitoring sessions. not that it changes your hardware question but software side its worth a look