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Getting started

Hammunition turns a fresh Debian-family install into a working amateur radio, SDR and RF workstation. This section is the path from that fresh install to your first decoded signal, written so a licensed ham with moderate Linux experience never has to read a forum thread to finish.

The order that works:

  1. Installation — the full, numbered walkthrough, with every command and the output it prints, from a fresh machine to an installed and verified profile, with the differences for each supported system. Start here if you want nothing left out. The pages below are the shorter route.
  2. Install the engine — the short form: five minutes, no root until you install something. ./bootstrap.sh puts hammunition on your PATH, which is how every example here runs it; if your shell says command not found, that page says what to run instead.
  3. How much disk you need — one or two profiles fit in about 5 GB, the whole catalog in about 55 GB, and offline maps and Wikipedia are what make a disk large. Every figure says where it came from.
  4. Your first profile — station, the floor every setup stands on, then a mode profile.
  5. First contact — a digital-modes station making its first decode. The full walk-through is FT8 and the digital modes, with Radio audio beside it.
  6. The guides — rig control, audio and the clock once, then FT8, Winlink, APRS, SDR listening, satellites, each start to finish.

Everything the engine does to your machine, it prints before it does it, and records after. --dry-run shows the whole plan and changes nothing; a package it cannot install is refused by name rather than skipped. You are never surprised by this tool — that is the entire design.

What you need

  • A Debian-family OS: Parrot OS (primary), Debian 13, Ubuntu, Kali, or Raspberry Pi OS. The engine reads /etc/os-release and refuses anything that is not Debian-family rather than pretending to support it. What works on which desktop says what is measured on KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt and the rest; the tray switches in particular depend on it.
  • Disk space. About 5 GB free for one or two profiles, about 55 GB for the whole catalog; the disk page has every figure and its source.
  • A normal user account with sudo. The engine drops to your user wherever it can and asks for sudo only for apt and system changes.
  • An internet connection. Source builds and pinned artifacts are fetched and verified against a checksum; nothing unverified is ever installed.
  • For a digital-modes station: a radio, an audio interface between it and the computer (a sound-card interface or a Digirig-class device), and CAT control if you want frequency and mode followed automatically.

What you do not need

  • To be root to plan anything. list, status, show and --dry-run need no privileges at all.
  • To trust the tool. Read the plan. It is complete and accurate, not approximate — if it were not, that would be a bug worth filing.
  • To install everything. Profiles are opt-in bundles; nothing lands on your machine that you did not ask for, and RF-security tooling sits behind an explicit consent gate.

If something goes wrong

Troubleshooting is organised by symptom. Start with Installing if a plan or an install stopped, and Running if a program installed but misbehaves. hammunition doctor is read-only and names the one command that fixes each gap it finds.