so ive been messing around with a v3 RTL-SDR dongle for about 6 months now and honestly it blew my mind for the price, running SDR# on windows and getting into airband, weather satellites with WXtoImg, even decoded some ADS-B which was just fun to mess with. but ive been eyeballing the SDRplay RSP1A for a while now and wondering if its actually worth jumping up to that price point or if im just suffering from gear acquisition syndrome again

main thing i want to do is get better on HF without having to use the upconverter trick, the direct sampling mode on the RTL-SDR works but its pretty rough below like 10 MHz, lot of noise and birdies and whatnot. also been wanting to try some weakSIG stuff on 40m. anyone gone from RTL-SDR to RSP1A and felt like it was a meaningful upgrade or did you just end up with basically the same experience at 5x the price

running a random wire antenna right now, nothing fancy, so maybe the antenna is the weak link and not the dongle anyway, i dunno

the RSP1A is a real step up, not gonna lie to you. the dynamic range difference is noticeable especially if youre anywhere near a strong broadcast station, the RTL-SDR tends to get stomped pretty bad in those situations. HF on the RSP1A without an upconverter is genuinely usable, i can pull in 40m SSB just fine with mine into a longwire. SDRuno is a bit clunky compared to SDR# but you can also use it with SDR++ which has gotten really good lately and supports the RSPx devices natively now.

that said, if your antenna situation is rough, yeah that might be limiting you more than the hardware. a better antenna will do more for weak signal work than swapping receivers tbh. but if you can swing the cost the RSP1A is not a toy, its a legitimate piece of kit. i use mine alongside my IC-7300 sometimes just for wideband monitoring while working a frequency, handy for that.

honestly i went the other direction and got a HackRF instead because i wanted to transmit and do some experiments with signal generation. totally different use case i know but just throwing it out there. the HackRF receive sensitivity isnt as good as even the RTL-SDR in a lot of people's experience, its more of a tx/rx tool than a pure listening receiver. if youre just wanting to receive better on HF the RSP1A or even a used SDRplay RSP2 would probably suit you more than anything

random wire should be fine for getting started on HF recieve, i ran one for ages