so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about two years now, mostly doing ADSB and occasional HF with the direct sampling mod, and honestly its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel like im hitting the ceiling with it. sensitivity isnt great on HF and the dynamic range is just kind of a mess when im near the AM broadcast band.

been looking at either picking up a HackRF One or going with an SDRplay RSP1C and i cant really make up my mind. i know the HackRF is technically a transceiver which is kind of cool in theory but i also know its a pretty mediocre receiver compared to dedicated RX-only hardware at that price point. the 8-bit ADC thing keeps coming up whenever i read about it and i get why thats a limitation but im not doing transmitting so maybe that whole side of it is irrelevant to me.

the RSP1C seems like a more logical choice if all i care about is receiving - 14-bit ADC, better noise figure especially up top, works fine in SDR++ which is what i use now. but its also like twice the price of a HackRF depending where you find one and the HackRF has a huge community and tons of projects built around it so there's that.

mostly interested in decoding stuff, weather sat imagery, trunked P25 monitoring, maybe poking around on 70cm and above to see whats up there, and general shortwave utility listening. anyone switched from RTL to one of these and have actual opinions on the difference

went through basically this same thing last year. had the v3 dongle for ages and finally pulled the trigger on an RSP1C and yeah the difference on HF is pretty noticeable. not transformative but the intermod situation is way better when you've got strong signals nearby. i run mine through SDR++ with the notch filter on for broadcast AM and its actually usable now for stuff like WSPR grabbing and utility decoding on 40m area.

the HackRF i actually bought first weirdly enough and used it for maybe three months. the receive side is fine honestly, like i could do everything you're describing with it, but the noise floor was bothering me and i kept reading that an LNA up front helps a lot which then you're spending more money anyway. if you're doing 70cm and up the HackRF goes way higher in frequency which might matter depending on what you're chasing. for weather sats and P25 though either will do it, my RTL-SDR was doing both fine before i upgraded. the RSP1C is just a cleaner experience if receiving is the whole point

hackrf if you ever think you might want to do any transmitting or signal generation experiments, rspplay if you just want to listen and want it to actually work well. pretty simple split imo. the 8bit vs 14bit thing is real and shows up in practice not just on paper.

also worth mentioning - SDR++ is great but if you're doing P25 trunking specifically you'll probably end up running trunk-recorder or DSD+ alongside it anyway so make sure whatever you pick has solid driver support on whatever OS you're on. the sdrplay drivers on linux were kind of a pain for a while but its gotten better