so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now and honestly its been fine for most stuff, ADS-B, weather satellites, poking around the bands, but i keep running into the dynamic range wall especially anywhere near the AM broadcast band or when i have a strong local pager system hammering the front end. been looking at upgrading and kinda torn between the SDRplay RSP1B and a HackRF One.

i know they're kind of different tools. the HackRF is full duplex capable and goes up way higher in frequency but the noise figure is not great from what ive read, like 8-10dB across most of the range which is pretty rough for weak signal stuff. the RSP1B seems more focused on the receiver side and supposedly has much better dynamic range but you cant transmit obviously.

mostly what i want to do is better HF reception, some decoding of digital modes (FT8 just to see if it works, some P25 monitoring for local public safety before they went encrypted, and maybe eventually some satcom stuff). not really planning to transmit with it. is the RSP1B actually worth the price jump over just getting a better filtered RTL setup or am i missing something. also does anyone actually use SDR Console vs SDRuno for the RSP hardware, ive heard mixed things

had the RSP1A before the B came out and honestly the dynamic range improvement over a stock RTL dongle is pretty noticeable on HF, especially below 10 MHz where the AM broadcast garbage used to just smear everything. the dual tuner on the 1B is nice if you want to run two independent bands at once but for what youre describing you probably wont use it much.

on the software question, SDRuno is fine but feels a little clunky to me. SDR Console handles the RSP hardware well now and the interface makes more sense if youre already used to something like HDSDR or gqrx. i personally run SDR Console for most stuff and then pipe it into VB-Audio cable to Unitrunker or DSD+ for any trunked system decoding. works pretty reliably once you get the audio routing figured out which takes an afternoon the first time.

for your use case id skip the HackRF. the noise figure really does hurt it for receive-only work. if you ever want to do transmit experiments later thats a different story but it sounds like you dont need that right now.

the hackrf gets a bad rap for receive sensitivity but honestly for satcom stuff above like 400MHz its not as bad as people say in my experience. i use mine for NOAA APT and some GOES work and its fine with a good LNA out front. you kind of have to treat it like it needs an external LNA almost always and then it becomes more useful. still wouldnt recommend it as your only receiver though if HF is the priority.