so ive been messing around with a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about 6 months now and honestly its been great for just poking around, listening to NOAA, doing some ADS-B with dump1090, that kind of thing. but im starting to hit the limits of it, especially on HF where the direct sampling mode is fine but not exactly stellar. the noise floor bothers me more than i expected it would.

so now im trying to decide whether to step up to an SDRplay RSP1A or just go ahead and get a HackRF One. the HackRF is obviously more versatile since you can transmit with it (though i know its not exactly a precision instrument for that) and covers way more spectrum, but the RSP1A seems to have way better receive performance specs at least on paper. 14-bit ADC vs the HackRF's 8-bit is kind of a big deal right?

my main use cases are probably HF ham bands, some 2m and 70cm monitoring, maybe messing around with trunked systems in SDR++ or SDRuno. not really planning to do any transmitting with it at least not right now. anybody gone through this same decision? what did you end up getting and do you regret it

honestly for pure receive quality the RSP1A isnt even close to the HackRF, the 8-bit ADC on the HackRF shows its limitations pretty quick when you've got strong signals nearby, the dynamic range just isnt there. i had a HackRF for about a year and it was fun to play with but i ended up grabbing an RSP2 and barely touched the HackRF after that. the RSPdx is probably what id look at now if i were buying today, the low band performance below 2 MHz is actually usable which is more than i can say for most things in that price range.

that said if you ever think youll want to do any transmit experiments, even just to understand how things work, the HackRF gives you that option. SDRangel has decent transmit support for it. just dont expect it to be a real transceiver lol

I went RSP1A about two years ago coming from the same RTL-SDR v3 situation you're describing and haven't looked back. SDRuno is a bit clunky to learn but once you get the hang of the IF bandwidth controls and the notch filters it does things the RTL-SDR just can't touch. The selectivity difference on crowded HF bands is pretty noticeable. I run mine into a 9:1 unun on a random wire and it works well enough that I actually use it alongside my regular rig sometimes just to have the waterfall up on a second monitor.

One thing worth mentioning - SDR++ works with the RSP1A now and a lot of people prefer it to SDRuno, I've been switching back and forth. The RSP1A also plays nice with HDSDR if you install the ExtIO plugin. Anyway point being the software ecosystem for it is pretty solid at this point which wasn't always the case.