It depends on how much you want to spend.

Funcube Dongles are still available, so far as i know.

SDRPlay range well worth a look.. much bigger bandwidth available.

Airspy HF+ is another alternative, smaller bandwidth but higher dynamic range, but no UHF coverage so far as I know.

My Fun Cube Dongle Pro Plus has gone "Phut!"
Might any kind person suggest an answer
or a replacement please?

VHF/UHF can be catered for with an SDR.com RTL-SDR which has great performance for a very low price, but only buy from SDR.com themselves as there are a lot of clones around.

Just in case there is any doubt, the Funcube Dongles are a completely different animal to the RTL-type dongles.

Funcube dongles are 16-bit, 192Khz bandwidth with extra SAW filters for 144 and 432Mhz. I bought mine in 2013 and I still use it to this day, mostly for 2m reception.

The RTL dongles are toy junk imo. They always disappoint.

I have a RSP2, and am happy with it for the most part, but as mentioned,  it can be subject  to overload on the AM broadcast band. I got around the problem by building a series tuned wave trap using a 365 of variable capacitor and a toroid which I tuned to the local AM station on 800 khz. It effectively shorts the offending station to ground 

RTL dongles are RTL dongles no matter who you buy them from. You can get worse dongles than usual; but, you cannot get "good" dongles with more than 8 bits per sample reception. So it is limited in that matter. It is also fairly easy to overload it, especially if you play with individual gain settings for its three internal gain settings. On HF an RTL dongle is pathetic at best. The AirSpy R2 is MUCH better. The RX888 is an interesting tool that SDR Console does not drive as well as it should. (Color me frustrated with my periodic enhancement request duly appended to the forum's requests. I did add an idea to make it more usable and palatable for Simon, perhaps. A zoomable spectrum/waterfall window per receiver permanently centered on the tuned frequency, such as possible, with a 1 MHz bandwidth would make catching signals that pop up on offbeat frequencies easier to catch. The existing per receiver windows have too narrow a frequency range.) Re the RX888 MKII, I live about 3 miles away from a small flame thrower. The MKII treats it as just another signal with no spurs.

{^_^}

On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 03:01 PM, Brent Seres/ VE3CUS wrote:

I have a RSP2, and am happy with it for the most part, but as mentioned,  it can be subject  to overload on the AM broadcast band. I got around the problem by building a series tuned wave trap using a 365 of variable capacitor and a toroid which I tuned to the local AM station on 800 khz. It effectively shorts the offending station to ground 

Hi Brent. Unfortunately you've confirmed my issue with RSP2. I mentioned I have RSP2Pro and also HF+. I also have a local multi-kW AM TX about 10km away. It flattened the RSP2 and images all over the place. I can only describe it as appalling. I have none of those issues with HF+. It just works. No additional notch filters necessary, and not hundreds of images all over the spectrum. But as I say, the HF+ does not have the wider sampling bandwidth or the VHF/UHF frequency coverage of the SDR Play models. Horses for courses.

Chris, yes, I have read good things of the RSP-DX. If reports are true it's certainly much improved but the originally deficient design sure needed improvement for HF. I haven't tried one so I would not rule it out for sure. The Duo I think is very similar in design to the original RSP1/2 variants. I won't be trying one of those. I admit I'm lucky to live in an RF quiet, low noise location (for first time in over 40 years!). Again, if it works for you that's great.

To be honest if I were David I'd personally go for the RX888. Direct sampling is the state of the art and paired with SDRC has to be the superior solution but from many reports the RX888 is sometimes not quite "plug and play" so that's why I'm hesitant to recommend it for all users if they need total ease of setup.

Max

Nooelec has band reject filters for both AM and FM broadcast. The AM unit seems to work nicely when needed. Now I don't use it, though, with the 888 MKII.

{^_^}

Airspy Discovery’s max bandwidth is 912 kHz with firmware update.
The RSP 1A is terrible when used near AM BC transmitters on good antennas. I had to build a
W1VLF AM BC filter for the server that has the last remaining RSP 1A in my fleet of SDRs.

My first choice in SDR’s for HF are Airspy Discovery, with the SDR-iq (discontinued) as my second choice.


73 Kriss KA1GJU

Have you tried the server feature of SDRC vs Spyserver?
I run 13 SDR’s on 5 different servers on various antennas if you want to experiment. Max connections per IP address is 2. You can play two different SDR mfgs on the same antenna for easy A/B tests.

73 Kriss KA1GJU