Best Software Defined Radio Transceiver – HackRF One

HackRF One covers a wide frequency range from 10 MHz to 6000 MHz, including the most popular operating bands. It features both a transmitter and receiver, allowing for true standalone operation as a radio system. The sampling rate of HackRF is 200,000 samples per second, allowing users to process a 10 MHz wide waveform. The product has a USB 2.0 interface, enabling high-speed data throughput to the host processor. The antenna port can provide up to 3 mA of current at +50.3 V, allowing low-noise amplifiers to operate, reducing noise and improving sensitivity.

HackRF is completely open-source, supporting GNU Radio, SDR#, and has a large user community with active mailing lists and support. HackRF offers great value and is one of the best SDRs available today.

Pros

• Completely open-source

• Many online learning resources, including operation videos

• Excellent accessories like PortaPack

• Frequency coverage and bandwidth

Cons

• Maximum input signal power is -5 dBm. Stronger signals than this can damage HackRF. This is a very low maximum input level, and care must be taken not to inject strong signals into the RF input.

• Half-duplex operation, so it cannot transmit and receive simultaneously.

• The power amplifier in the transmitter is prone to damage, and repairing it is a daunting task.

Runner-up Software Defined Radio Transceiver – ADALM Pluto

Our runner-up is ADI’s ADALM Pluto. Like HackRF, this is a transceiver product, allowing you to send and receive signals. Launched in 2018, although it’s a relatively new product, it has excellent support from MATLAB for education and has developed a complete set of free educational courses around this hardware. ADALM Pluto is priced lower than HackRF, making it very appealing in terms of value.

Pros

• Price

• Full-duplex – Transmitter and receiver can operate simultaneously

• Independent transmitter and receiver ports – Signals can be amplified separately

Cons

• Limited frequency range from 325 MHz to 3.8 GHz. This means it cannot be used for HF, FM, and some other popular applications and operating bands.

• Lack of GNU Radio support.

• No front-end filtering. This makes the SDR very susceptible to unwanted interference signals.

Best Budget Software Defined Radio Receiver – RTL-SDR

If you are looking for a low-cost device to experiment with SDR and dip your toes in, then RTL-SDR is your best choice. This is a small USB dongle packed with radio receiver electronics! Due to its low cost, it is indeed the Arduino of the SDR world. RTL-SDR is used in thousands of applications such as aircraft tracking, mobile identification, amateur radio, and schools for learning communication signal processing.

RTL-SDR has some nice gain control settings and can be adjusted with an external low-noise amplifier to improve sensitivity and optimize linearity if needed.

Pros

• Large user community

• Wide software support – From GNU Radio to MATLAB, nearly all software is compatible with this device

Cons

• Very limited frequency range – Cannot cover many popular bands

• Other hardware specifications like bandwidth and dynamic range are also limited

Best Software Defined Radio Receiver – SDRPlay RSP1A

SDRPlay RSP1A is a powerful broadband, full-featured 14-bit SDR receiver that continuously covers the RF spectrum from 1 kHz to 2 GHz. The product has a bandwidth of 10 MHz, sufficient for most RF signal needs. It is used with the hardware-provided free Windows-based SDRuno software. This is the only receiver product that genuinely has a built-in preselector filter in hardware. As discussed here, the preselector filter helps reduce the impact of strongly interfering out-of-band signals.

SDRPlay RSP1A offers excellent control features for adjusting linearity and trade-offs based on gain and noise figure. The benefit of this is that users can adjust the receiver based on the strength and frequency of the signal.

For more advanced receiver options, this hardware also has a slightly more expensive version with two software-selectable inputs, called RSPDx.