so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about two years now and honestly its been great for what it is, airband, weather sat, trunked scanning around here, the usual stuff. but lately ive been wanting to get into some lower HF stuff properly and also mess around with some of the weaker signal decoding like WSPR and FT8 on receive only, not transmitting or anything.

my question is basically whether the SDRplay RSP1B is worth jumping to over just grabbing a HackRF. i know the HackRF can transmit which is cool but the receive specs on it always seemed kinda mediocre compared to dedicated receivers. the noise figure on the HackRF is rough from what ive read. SDRplay seems like it was actually designed to receive well. but the HackRF being open hardware and all the software support is tempting.

currently using SDR# and a little bit of SDR++ which i actually prefer now. would probably stick with SDR++ and maybe GQRX if i go Linux for this. anyway anyone gone from RTL to one of these and have thoughts? not looking to spend RSP2 money right now

the HackRF receive performance is genuinely not great, like its fine for strong signals but once you start trying to pull weak stuff out of the noise you're going to notice it versus a dedicated receiver. the ADC resolution alone is 8-bit versus the SDRplay stuff which is up to 14-bit depending on the model, and that matters a lot when you're trying to decode WSPR spots that are barely above the noise floor.

i ran a HackRF for about a year before picking up an RSP1A and the difference on HF was pretty significant. SDR++ works great with the SDRplay drivers too, had no issues there. if you dont need to transmit i'd honestly skip the HackRF entirely for your use case. the transmit side of the HackRF is cool for experimenting but if you're just monitoring and decoding you'd be paying for a feature you wont use while getting worse receive performance. RSP1B is a solid step up from RTL without breaking the bank

yeah what he said about the 8-bit ADC is the main thing people dont talk about enough. for FT8 receive it probably wont matter much since those signals arent that weak generally but WSPR is a different story and honestly the RTL-SDR v3 with a good LNA and some filtering can do surprisingly well on HF already if you havent tried that route. a Nooelec LaNA or the RTL-SDR blog LNA with a high pass filter does a lot before you spend more money on hardware.

that said i did eventually go SDRplay and dont regret it