so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR V3 dongle for about a year now, mostly airband and some APRS decoding, and im starting to hit the walls of what it can do. the noise floor is pretty rough on anything above like 800MHz and i keep reading that the ADC is just not that great compared to proper SDR hardware.

anyway ive been looking at either jumping to a HackRF One or going with the SDRplay RSP1A and i honestly cant figure out which way to make sense. the HackRF is attractive because you can transmit (i do have my general license so that part is fine), but i keep reading that its receive performance is actually not as good as you'd expect for the price, like the noise figure isnt that impressive and the 8-bit ADC thing bothers me. the RSP1A has 14-bit ADC and i think the sensitivity is supposed to be much better for receive-only stuff.

mostly what im doing is airband VHF/UHF monitoring, some P25 trunking with SDR Trunk, and occasionally trying to pick up some weak HF signals through SDRangel. not really planning to transmit with the SDR itself so maybe the HackRF transmit capability is kind of wasted on me. but then again being able to do spectrum analysis and maybe some fox hunting stuff with the transmit side is appealing.

anyone run both or switched from one to the other? running SDR# mostly on windows but been messing with GQRX on a linux box too.

had both at the same time for a while so maybe i can help. the RSP1A just walks all over the HackRF for receive, thats not even close. the 14-bit versus 8-bit difference is real and you notice it immediately especially on crowded bands. with the hackrf i was always fighting dynamic range issues if there was anything strong nearby, like a local repeater would just wash out everything around it. the RSP1A handles that way better.

for what youre describing - airband, P25 trunking, HF monitoring - the RSP1A is the obvious answer honestly. SDRuno works fine but i personally run mine in SDR# with the ExtIO plugin and it works great. SDRTrunk plays nicely with it too through a virtual audio cable setup.

the hackrf transmit stuff sounds cool in theory but in practice for actual amateur use its kind of limited, the output power is low and you need external amps for anything useful. if you want to do fox hunting or direction finding youre probably better off with dedicated hardware anyway. id just get the RSP1A and put the saved money toward a decent LNA and some filters.

yeah the 8-bit adc on the hackrf is kind of its achilles heel for serious monitoring work. its a fantastic tool for certain things like signal analysis, replay attacks in research contexts, wideband sweeping - but if you just want to sit and listen and decode stuff the RSP1A or even the RSP2 if you can find one used is going to make you happier day to day. ive got an RSP1A and a V3 dongle and the difference in receive quality is pretty obvious especially down on HF where the RTL-SDR starts to struggle even with the direct sampling mod.

one thing nobody mentions enough is that SDRplay's driver support on linux has gotten a lot better in the last couple years. used to be kind of a pain but now it mostly just works which matters if youre splitting time between windows and linux like you said.