so ive been messing with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly just listening to aircraft and the occasional P25 trunking stuff in my area, and im starting to feel like i'm hitting the ceiling of what the dongle can do. dynamic range is just not there when i try to do anything near the broadcast FM band, which yeah i know is kind of a known thing with RTL dongles but its getting annoying.

anyway ive been looking at either the HackRF One or the SDRplay RSP1B and i cant quite figure out which direction to go. the HackRF has TX which is appealing even though i dont have an immediate use for it, but ive heard the noise floor isnt actually that great compared to what you'd expect for the price. the RSP1B looks cleaner on paper, 1kHz to 2GHz, 14-bit ADC, that all sounds good but its receive-only and the SDRuno software is... i dunno, ive only seen screenshots.

mostly i want better performance for HF stuff, maybe some weather satellite decoding, and just general poking around. running SDR# and GQRX on a linux box. anyone actually used both and can give me a real world take rather than the spec sheet comparison i keep finding?

had both at the same time for a while actually. the RSP1B is just a better receiver, full stop. the HackRF is a swiss army knife but the blade kinda sucks — its a 8-bit ADC under the hood and you feel it. dynamic range on the hackrf near any strong signal is rough. i was trying to do some HF monitoring and a broadcast station a few MHz away was just stomping everything.

that said if you ever want to do anything that requires transmit, even just replaying signals for testing your own gear, hackrf is your only option in that price range. the RSP1B wont do that. for pure listening though, SDRplay wins easy. SDRuno is a bit of a learning curve but its actually pretty capable once you get used to it, lots of plugin support now too. on linux you can run it under wine or just use SDR++ which works great with the RSPx series and honestly i use that more than SDRuno anyway.

for weather sats the RSP1B with SDR++ and then piped into SatDump is a really solid setup. i was pulling clean HRPT from NOAA-18 last winter with just a V-dipole out the window, not even a proper dish.

SDR++ with either one is the move imo, forget SDRuno for linux. just my two cents but the price difference between those two devices felt worth it when i actually sat down and compared HF reception. hackrf always felt like it was wearing earmuffs lol. the RSP1B isnt perfect but for the money its hard to beat if TX isnt on your list.