so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about two years now mostly doing aircraft and weather sat stuff, some APRS decoding, and just general band scanning when im bored. works fine for what it is but ive been reading about the RSP1B and wondering if its actually worth the jump in price or if im just falling into gear acquisition syndrome again

main thing i keep hearing is the dynamic range difference is significant especially if youre anywhere near strong broadcast FM stations which i am, im maybe 4 miles from a 100kw transmitter and sometimes i get some weird imaging artifacts that im pretty sure are coming from that. tried a FM notch filter which helped a bit but still not perfect

anyone gone from an RTL to an RSP or even a HackRF who can actually describe what the difference feels like in practice? not looking for spec sheets, i can read those, just want to know if weak signal stuff on HF is meaningfully better or if im just gonna spend $120 and be disappointed

went through this exact same thing about a year ago. was running the RTL-SDR blog v3 with the direct sampling mod enabled for HF and honestly it was fine for like 40m AM broadcast and some shortwave stuff but yeah the dynamic range thing is real, especially near strong locals. switched to the RSP1A (not the B, the older one i got used) and the difference on crowded HF bands is pretty noticeable. not night and day for VHF and above but for anything below 30MHz the front end just handles strong signals better without everything turning into a mess

the SDRuno software that comes with it is a bit clunky to set up the first time but i actually use SDR++ with the RSP now and that combo is really solid. if youre mainly doing aircraft and weather sats though honestly the RTL-SDR might be all you need, those signals arent exactly weak. the RSP shines when youre trying to dig out something marginal on a busy band

HackRF is a different animal if you're thinking about that route - its a transmitter too which changes the use case entirely but the receive sensitivity is actually not as good as either the RTL or RSP for just monitoring. its got a 8-bit ADC versus the 12-bit on the RSP and you can kinda tell on weak stuff. i have one and i mostly use it for transmit experiments and replay stuff, not really my go-to for just listening

for your FM overload problem honestly look into whether the RSP1B has better filtering before you buy, i believe it does have some improvements there but dont quote me on the specifics. might also just be worth trying a better bandpass or a cavity filter upstream before spending money on new hardware. sometimes its the antenna situation more than the receiver