Antennas are fascinating, some of the simplest antennas work much better than one would expect and some extremely complex antennas that should work like magic are disappointing.
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As to SDRs, they've come a long way in 3 or 4 years in terms of performance.
The more bits you A>D has, the better the performance, although there are tricks such as decimation to improve performance, sort of cheating to use math in the computer CPU to create artificial additional bits.
But this 'steals' performance and can be quite demanding of CPU resources.
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I've had good luck with the SDRplay series, the RSP1 was their introductory product and OK, they rapidly learned from beginner's mistakes and all their newer models are OK.?
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The Perseus (original) is an amazing receiver, it was quite pricey but worth it.
I'm an analog man, prefer my heavily modified, antique, Kenwood R2000 to any SDR, but the RSPdx is an OK receiver optimized for LW/MW but still does VHF to high UHF. I use it as a panadter [telling my age there] and it works very well for that function. It is very nice to be able to see what's on either side of where you are tuned, you can ID CW, AM, LSB, USB, digital from the 'squiggles' as my wife calls them.
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