Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)

How does one use random wire antenna in an urban area!

Tried once and just got huge amount of noise all over HF. Except for a few strong shortwave and Amateur Radio stations, the rest of HF was pretty useless.

Even had decent ground plane and tuned it.

For HF, look at the technical articles by PA3WFM for the WebSDR at utwente.nl, especially this one: https://www.pa3fwm.nl/technotes/tn07.html

TL,DR: you probably don't want a random wire for HF reception, but either an E-field whip antenna like that one, or an H-field loop which will likely be larger and more expensive, but will have useful directional properties that the whip will not.