Back in the 70s when shortwave was still king, we used to pack communications radios, rolls of antenna wire and jump on a train to travel up to northern Scandinavia to listen to faraway exotic stations on the medium and shortwave bands. It was an ideal environment with no electronic noise, mainly due to scarce population, and we were free to roll out 500 meters of longwire in various directions without upsetting anybody. Fun times indeed!
I occasionally get a long wire between buildings and listen to shortwave and bands. Sometime I’d like to get a HackRF and try out SDR and GNU Radio.
HackRF isn't the only way to go. There are other projects like T41-EP that can give you a really nice software defined platform as well.
Check it out here: https://www.4sqrp.com/T41main.php
(hint: you know it's a group of hams as soon as you see the colored fonts and grey background)
yeah you can also get an RTL-SDR for like $30 USD (or something) and listen to a pretty wide range of frequencies - definitely good enough to get started with a very small cost.
Not for shortwave. They don’t work below 50Mhz