so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and im pretty happy with it for just poking around on VHF and scanning some local stuff but i keep reading about how the dynamic range is kind of garbage compared to the proper SDR receivers and i had some birthday money burning a hole and i was looking at either grabbing a HackRF One or stepping up to an SDRplay RSP1B

my main thing is HF listening, some WSPR decoding, maybe trying to hear some shortwave broadcasts, and eventually i want to try decoding some ACARS and ADS-B which i already do fine on the RTL but you know how it is you always want the next thing

the HackRF is appealing because it transmits obviously but i dont have a license yet so thats kind of moot for now, and from what i can tell the receive performance is actually not that impressive compared to dedicated receive-only hardware? like the noise floor is supposedly worse than the RSP1B which makes sense i guess since half the silicon budget is going toward the TX side

anyone actually used both and can give me a straight answer without just quoting specs at me, i can read the datasheet myself lol

honest take: if youre doing HF and you want good results, the RSP1B walks all over the HackRF for receive. the HackRF is a great tool but its a swiss army knife and you pay for that versatility with a receive chain that isnt exactly optimized. the RSPdx is even better if you can stretch the budget a little, the switchable antenna ports and the HDR mode below 2 MHz actually make a noticeable difference for MW and 160m

SDRuno is... fine i guess, some people hate it because the UI is kind of a lot, but you can run the RSP hardware in SDR# with a plugin and that works well. for WSPR just pipe it into WSJT-X and you're golden. i ran one for about two years before upgrading and it really is a proper step up from dongle territory, not just a marginal thing

i have a hackrf and tbh for pure listening it kind of underwhelmed me, especially on HF. yeah you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it and the transmit side is fun once you're licensed but the noise floor drove me a little crazy when i was trying to do any serious decoding below 30 MHz. ended up keeping it for portapack experiments mostly

havent used the RSP1B specifically but a buddy has one and it seemed solid, he does a lot of NOAA APT decoding and some HF utility stuff and has no complaints