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Profile: listening

Shortwave, utility and aeronautical listening — no licence, no transmitter

Stage: 1.0

Who it is for

Someone who wants to receive and decode what is on the air without a licence and without transmitting: aircraft, ships, DAB and HD Radio, utility signals, weather satellites. It is the best on-ramp the catalog has.

At a glance
Stage 1.0
Units 28
Disk about 400 MB; eight source or pinned-git builds
Hardware An SDR and an antenna for the band you want. One dongle hears one band at a time, so ADS-B on 1090 MHz and UAT on 978 MHz together need two.
Consent none
Install hammunition install listening

What it installs

The aeronautical decoder cluster — ACARS, VDL Mode 2 and HFDL, with the shared library that turns their raw text into structured messages and a database to keep what was heard. Aircraft transponder decoding on both ADS-B links, 1090 MHz and the US-only 978 MHz UAT, with a multilateration feeder. Marine AIS three ways. DAB in a window and in a pipe, and HD Radio, the digital side of North American FM and AM. A multi-channel airband scanner, digital voice protocol decoding, paging and classic mode decoding, weather satellite imaging, two Morse decoders, and an offline signal-identification reference (Artemis, the sigidwiki database in a window) for the moment you see something on the waterfall and do not know what it is. SuperSDR connects to a remote KiwiSDR and synchronizes its panadapter with rig control; it has no upstream licence file, so it is carried under D-033 with that position stated here and is never mirrored.

Disk footprint: Around 400 MB. Six of these are source or pinned-git builds — the whole aeronautical cluster plus kalibrate-rtl — and dump978-fa and nrsc5 are two more, so the install takes longer than the size suggests.

Why these belong together

This is the profile that needs no licence and no transmitter, which makes it the best on-ramp this project has. Someone with a twenty-pound dongle and a wire can have aircraft on a map within an hour, and that is usually what turns an interest into a hobby. It is also where the Skywave delta lands. The aeronautical cluster in particular is a genuine hole in Debian — libacars, acarsdec, dumpvdl2 and dumphfdl are absent from stable and unstable, measured in containers — so it is the clearest case of the thing this project exists to do: install what a person cannot easily install themselves.

Packages (28)

libacars, acarsdec, acarsserv, dumpvdl2, dumphfdl, rtlsdr-airband, multimon-ng, multimon, dsdcc, readsb, tar1090, dump978-fa, mlat-client-adsbfi, gr-air-modes, rtl-ais, ais-catcher, gnuais, gnuaisgui, welle-io, dablin, nrsc5, satdump, kalibrate-rtl, morse2ascii, xdemorse, gqrx-sdr, supersdr, artemis

What it deliberately excludes

Anything that transmits, and anything aimed at protected communications — those are rf-security and the consent-gated rf-research.

Install it

Read the plan first. It changes nothing and prints every package, build, file and system change, and every consent gate you will meet:

hammunition show listening
hammunition install listening --dry-run

Then do it. The engine asks for your sudo password once, near the start, and shows the same plan again before it asks you to confirm:

hammunition install listening

A member your machine cannot take is deferred by name and the rest installs (D-039); the plan lists each under Will NOT happen, with the reason and the command that fixes it. Installation explains how to read every part of the plan.

What you configure by hand afterward

An antenna for the band matters more than the receiver. A quarter wave for 1090 MHz is about 7 cm and for marine VHF about 46 cm; either, outside, will multiply what a stub on a desk achieves, and 1090 MHz is line of sight so height is everything. Determine the dongle's PPM correction — the two AIS channels are 50 kHz apart and an uncorrected offset silently puts one outside the filter, which reads as poor propagation. One dongle hears one band at a time: readsb on 1090 MHz and dump978-fa on 978 MHz together need two, and readsb can take dump978-fa's raw port as a second input so both links land in one set of JSON. Each decoder is configured separately and none is configured here; the aeronautical tools in particular want frequencies for your region. Feeding an aggregator publishes what your receiver hears and where it is, continuously, and every feeder here is off unless you configure it — that is a decision with a privacy dimension for the vessels and aircraft as well as for you.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Install sdr first, run hammunition hardware apply, log out and back in, and confirm the dongle with rtl_test. The SDR profile has the steps.
  2. Read the plan: hammunition install listening --dry-run. Several members build from source; on Ubuntu 24.04 a handful are deferred by name because the archive lacks them.
  3. Install: hammunition install listening.
  4. Start with the aircraft map: SDR first steps runs readsb and serves the map in a browser.
  5. Put an antenna for the band outside. A quarter wave for 1090 MHz is about 7 cm; height matters more than the receiver.
  6. Nothing here feeds an aggregator until you configure it. Decide that deliberately: feeding publishes what your receiver hears, and where it is.
  7. When you see something on the waterfall you cannot name, open artemis, the offline signal-identification reference.

Take it off again

hammunition uninstall listening --dry-run
hammunition uninstall listening

This removes what Hammunition itself installed and nothing else. It does not remove dependencies apt pulled in, group memberships or configuration files it wrote; the plan says so and the transaction log records them (D-004).