The TV receiver dongles recently available are only good down to the lower HF band, although there have been experimental modifications to extend that coverage. Since many may want some HF capability, here are some notes gathered from the SDR# Yahoo group about some of the possibilities....
I use the FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus instead of a RTL2832U based dongle when I want to do SDR on MF and/or HF frequencies. However it does cost around ten times as much as a typical RTL2832U based dongle.
http://www.funcubedongle.com/
David Taylor notes:
The FUNcube Dongle Pro Plus is an excellent choice. It is very well supported, and the profits go back into Amateur Radio through AMSAT UK. I have both the FCDPP and the earlier FCD.
I can go one better! How about free? 0-30Mhz?
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
You'll have to accept the Java permissions, the page is totally safe, or use Chrome and tick the html5 box.
Ah, OK - the answer to your question is "yes". And I could stop right there if I was feeling obnoxious. I'm not there yet. There are things that allow HF reception (and in some cases transmission) ranging from tens of dollars to thousands of dollars. There are some that allow receiving a wide swath of HF all at the same time and presenting a spectral display of the activity. And there are some which are sound card based that allow only a narrow band view near the tuned frequency.
The cheapest involves an RF upconverter in front of the standard dongle. It "sort of works", but you get potential overloading from AM broadcast and potential problems due to the up converter frequency from FM broadcast stations. You can step up from that to the USRP boxes from Ettus Research LLC. Of course, Osmocom should be mentioned for their hardware (with thanks for their RTLSDR work.) The Lazy Dog LD-1 was mentioned here lately. The next level of step up involves things like the ANAN-10, which runs near $1500 now. There is an ANAN-100HF in development that is an all mode SDR transceiver in the $2100 range. Then you get into the Flex Radio and SDR-IP league with prices from $2500-ish for SDR-IP through the Flex Radio models up to something like $5000.
Your call how far you want to go. Note that some of these require some assembly and some don't. ANAN-10 has excellent software AND is open source right down to its firmware.