Due to a hardware failure I need to buy another receiver. I’ve decided on an Airspy product to use with either a Pi 4 or 5. Is the R2 performance that much different than the Mini considering the $70 price difference?
I would say no. The only advantage is that it can run at 24MHz sample rate, and the difference in decoded messages won’t be very big at all. Certainly smaller than the difference between 12 MHz and 20 MHz and that’s already quite small for most cases.
Unless you want to use the R2 for other things as well, I’d say save your money.
Also a pi 4 is plenty powerful enough to run a mini at 20 MHz. A pi 5 might be useful if you want to run more than one receiver as it has a better usb controller.
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A Mini it is on a Pi4. 
The Pi’s do run print/scan serving, security monitoring in addition to ADSB serving. I have 8 of them and they all stay busy.
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