Rob Sherwood has been bench-testing HF receivers for decades, and the resulting table is the reference every serious operator checks before buying. It is also, in its native form, a wall of 163 rows and 14 columns. I scraped it into a database, added USD price research, and plotted it seven different ways — because the interesting things in this data are relationships between three variables at once, and a flat table cannot show those.
Source: sherweng.com/table.html · page revision “Updated 01 August 2026” · imported 24 Aug 2026
Each view below is a live 3D plot in the panel further down — drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, hover any point for the radio behind it. These are the things worth looking for.
The cloud does not slope upward with price. A 2022 FT-710 at $875 used scores 107 dB — better than the $10,000 IC-7800 (80 dB) and the $14,000 IC-R9500 (85 dB). Dynamic range tracks the calendar, not the invoice.
The hard physical limit behind the whole list. Not one of the 147 receivers with both figures beats its own reciprocal mixing dynamic range at close spacing. Points sitting well right of the diagonal are held back by something else — mixer or roofing filter — and still have RMDR in reserve.
The lead changes hands. Read left to right and the story of the last five decades of receiver design falls out of the bar heights.
If a radio were uniformly excellent it would be a flat high ridge. Almost none are. A top-ten finish on the Sherwood list happily coexists with a mediocre noise floor or a weak filter.
The classic front-end trade, laid out. Receivers with the worst bare noise floor are the ones with the most preamp gain on tap — the preamp is compensating for the front end, not adding headroom.
Age alone does not set residual value. The only receivers still above 100% of their original list are Collins S-line — the 75S-3C, 75S-3B and winged 75S-3 fetch 160-170% of a 1960s sticker — while solid-state flagships from the 1990s and 2000s shed most of theirs.
The specs did not move together. Phase noise and narrow-spaced DR3 roughly double from the pre-1990 era to the 2010s. Sensitivity and AGC threshold run the other way — 1970s sets score better — because modern front ends trade raw sensitivity for headroom. Blocking barely moves at all.
Seven WebGL panels served from my own Grafana. They need a moment to draw on first load.