Michelle Taylor

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly doing aircraft and some wideband scanning, and i want to step up to something that actually covers HF properly without the whole upconverter thing. been looking at the SDRplay RSP1C and the HackRF One and i cant really decide. the price gap isnt huge but its not nothing either. main thing i want to do is just sit on 40m and 80m in the evenings, monitor some utility stuff on shortwave, maybe poke at WSPR a bit. not doing any transmitting. the HackRF does TX but i dont really care about that right now. from what ive read the SDRplay has better sensitivity on HF but the HackRF has like way more bandwidth which sounds cool but also i dont know if i actually need 20 MHz of spectrum at once for what im doing. anyone running either of these with SDRuno or SDR++ that can give me a real world take? not the spec sheet stuff, i can read that myself. more like does it actually work the way you expect or are there weird gotchas

After reading about the recent major DXpeditions like TX5S Clipperton Island with operations on 160-6 meters, SSB, CW, RTTY, FT8, 6m EME, and Satellites, I'm curious about current equipment trends. The S21DX team preparation includes assembling antennas, testing equipment, and ensuring the proper setup for a 5KW generator. What I'm seeing is more emphasis on high power and gain antennas on as many bands as practical, to achieve a loud signal worldwide and keep control of the inevitable pileups. Operators may also receive and transmit on different frequencies, called split operation. Are QRP operations from rare DX locations becoming obsolete? As one famous DXpeditioner has noted "you have to be loud." Good antennas are an important factor in being able to work the smaller stations, and as much power as permitted should be used.