Reference Profile Sizing

Profile sizing across the five-source union

Generated by scripts/gen_profile_sizing.py. Do not edit by hand — regenerate. Every number below is derived from a measured inventory; the profile set and its names are the curated part and are argued rather than asserted.

Generated: 2026-09-03
Split threshold: anything over 80 packages is flagged

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Measured inputs — all five sources, no estimates left

Source	Basis	Units
Debian Blend	blend-inventory.md, 12 tasks	152 unique
Blend, installable on Debian 13	container probe	144
AHRL survivors	dispositions.md — CARRY + SUPERSEDE + REVIVE	86
73Linux delta survivors	dispositions.md — CARRY + ADD	13
Skywave delta	skywave-inventory.md	9
DragonOS Tier 1	dragonos-tier1-inventory.md	24

Union upper bound: ~284 units before de-duplication. Profiles are flat tags with overlap (D-003), so the same package appears in several profiles and the per-profile totals deliberately sum to more than the union.

8 Blend packages do not install on Debian 13: aethersdr, dump1090-mutability, fbb, not1mm, odr-audioenc, qlog, sdrangel, sdrpp. All but odr-audioenc are in unstable, so most is release lag — but a user installing today on a stable base does not get them. Per D-005, coverage counts only where it installs, so the on stable column below is the honest one.

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Sizing

Blend counts task membership; on stable is how many of those actually install on Debian 13. Other is AHRL, 73Linux, Skywave and DragonOS Tier 1 attributed by disposition and menu category — the one estimated column, and estimated from measured survivor lists rather than from guesses.

Profile	Blend tasks	Blend	on stable	Other	Total	Verdict
station	rigcontrol, tools	20	20	6	26	✅
logging	logging	10	8 ⚠️	4	14	✅
morse	morse, training	13	13	2	15	✅
propagation	— + 6 partial	6	6	12	18	✅
digital-modes	datamodes, digitalvoice	22	22	22	44	✅
packet	packetmodes	19	18 ⚠️	12	31	✅
satellite	satellite	3	3	5	8	✅
antenna	antenna	7	7	8	15	✅
sdr	sdr	39	36 ⚠️	6	45	✅
listening	nonamateur	22	20 ⚠️	11	33	✅
electronics	—	0	0	6	6	✅
rf-security	—	0	0	14	14	✅
rf-research	—	0	0	1	1	post-1.0
rfid	—	0	0	6	6	post-1.0
workstation	—	0	0	7	7	post-1.0
editors	—	0	0	2	2	post-1.0
mesh	—	0	0	8	8	post-1.0
uconsole	—	0	0	5	5	post-1.0

No profile exceeds 80. That is the point of the split proposed below, not an accident.

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Naming — the actual deliverable

Profile names are the first thing an operator reads and effectively permanent once published — they appear in hammunition install <name>, in documentation, in forum posts, and in other people's shell history. Renaming one later breaks all of that. So the names are argued here.

Four rules, applied consistently.

1. Name the activity, not the package set. An operator knows they want to work satellites; they do not know they want gpredict plus satdump. Every name below is something a person would say out loud about their own station.
2. No adjectives, no size words. ham-core, ham-extra, ham-full describe our packaging decisions, not the operator's intent, and they force a reader to learn our taxonomy before they can choose. core in particular is a claim about importance that ages badly the moment someone disagrees with it.
3. One word where one word works. packet, satellite, antenna, logging, morse, sdr, listening, mesh. Hyphenate only when a single word would be ambiguous — digital-modes, rf-security.
4. Say what it is, not what it is not. nonamateur is the Blend's name for the task we map to listening; it defines a category by exclusion, which tells a newcomer nothing.

Two names are deliberately not what you might expect.

station, not ham-core. core is the packaging word this project was built to avoid — it invites "what's not core?" and makes everything else feel optional-in-a-bad-way. station is what an operator calls the thing they are building. hammunition install station reads as a sentence. It also survives the split cleanly: station is what every station needs, and logging, morse and propagation are things some stations want, which is exactly true.

rf-security, not sigint. Three reasons, in order of weight.

• It is what CLAUDE.md already calls it. The docs section is docs/rf-security/, the security requirement says "RF-security tooling lives in its own profile requiring explicit opt-in". Using a different word in the CLI than in the documentation is a defect.
• SIGINT is a term of art with a specific meaning — signals intelligence, as practised by states. Most of what this profile contains is Wi-Fi auditing, Bluetooth sniffing, ISM decoding and protocol analysis. Calling that SIGINT overclaims what the tools do and mis-sets expectations in both directions.
• It reads better on a shared machine. This runs alongside offensive tooling on people's work laptops. rf-security describes a discipline; sigint describes an intelligence function, and the difference matters to whoever reads the operator's screen over their shoulder.

One name is held back. cellular is proposed but not defined, pending Q-008. Naming a profile before deciding what goes in it is how you end up renaming it.

The proposed set

name	What the operator reads	Why this name
station	Station essentials	What every station needs before it can do anything else: rig control, hamlib, propagation-free basics, the tools that other profiles assume.
logging	Contest and DX logging	Most operators want one logger, not nine. Splitting it out means the choice is visible and the default is stated.
morse	CW and Morse training	Self-contained, and its two Blend tasks already overlap heavily. Nobody needs it to make a digital contact.
propagation	Propagation and spotting	Clocks, cluster clients, grid tools, beacon monitors. Genuinely optional and heavy on web-service dependencies, so it is the first thing a low-bandwidth or offline station wants to skip.
digital-modes	FT8, JS8 and the digital modes	The reason most people install something like this. Wide but coherent.
packet	Packet, Winlink and EMCOMM	The 73Linux delta lands here whole. AHRL has none of it.
satellite	Satellites and weather imaging	Small. SatDump carries most of the weight now that the APT decoders are retired.
antenna	Antennas and modelling	NEC modelling, coverage prediction, analyser tooling.
sdr	SDR receivers and device support	Large, and a third of the Blend's sdr task is per-hardware Soapy modules a one-dongle user does not need. See the hardware-detection note.
listening	Shortwave and utility listening	The Skywave delta lands here. Works with no transmitter and no licence, which makes it the best on-ramp we have.
electronics	Bench and electronics	KiCad, gerbv, spice. Fine software; not radio. Opt-in, per the PARITY-POLICY question reserved to the maintainer.
rf-security	RF security and spectrum analysis	DragonOS Tier 1, opt-in, with the legal framing CLAUDE.md requires. Its final shape depends on Q-008.
rf-research (post-1.0)	Transmit-capable and interception-capable RF tooling	Consent-gated (D-021). Contents provisional pending Q-008 — the receive-only subset only, with transmit-capable cellular stacks excluded.
rfid (post-1.0)	RFID and NFC	Accepted, Q-010. Different domain, different range, different skills. Five of six are apt on every probed target; proxmark3 is apt on Kali only (4.21611-0kali1, measured 2026-08-26) and a pinned source build on the other three including the primary one, so it still needs the source backend. An earlier version of this line said nothing was packaged on any target — that was wrong and is corrected in Q-010.
workstation (post-1.0)	Terminal and bench tooling	Accepted, Q-011. Not radio software; a lab machine needs it. Deliberately boring, and the exclusion list is a required schema field so it stays that way. Sized at nine until 2026-09-03, when the two editors moved to editors — each needs a publisher's apt repository on most targets (D-040), and that gate was withholding the other seven (D-039).
editors (post-1.0)	VS Code and VSCodium, opt-in	Split from workstation on 2026-09-03. Both are apt packages from a publisher's repository against a pinned key (D-040); the consent gate is per repository and --yes cannot satisfy it. Opt-in by construction.
mesh (post-1.0)	Mesh and LoRa	Meshtastic, Reticulum. Post-1.0.
uconsole (post-1.0)	ClockworkPi uConsole	Hardware-specific: display, audio routing, power. Post-1.0.

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The ham-core split

The previous sizing put ham-core at ~62 — under the threshold, but the worst profile to get wrong, because it is what a new user installs first and it forms their impression of the whole project.

It was large because it absorbed five Blend tasks at once. Split four ways:

Profile	Absorbs	Why it is a coherent thing to name
station	rigcontrol, tools	The floor. Rig control, hamlib, the utilities everything else assumes. Installs fast, contains no surprises.
logging	logging	An operator wants a logger. Nine is a menu, not a feature. Splitting makes the default an explicit, documented choice.
morse	morse, training	Already self-contained — the two Blend tasks overlap by five packages and by nothing else.
propagation	AHRL's HF_Propagation cluster	Clocks, cluster clients, grid and beacon tools. Optional, and the heaviest user of external web services in the catalog.

Each of the four passes the test a profile should pass: an operator can name it without being told what is in it, and can explain why they do or do not want it.

station is the one to keep small. Everything that gets added to it is something a first-time user did not ask for and has to wait through.

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The sigint split

rf-security measures well under the threshold, so this is not a size problem. It is a kind problem, and Q-008 is the open question.

The DragonOS Tier 1 inventory found that the units divide by transmit, not by topic:

Group	Contents	Character
Analysis and audit	wireshark, aircrack-ng, hcxdumptool/hcxtools, ubertooth, inspectrum, rtl-433, kismet	Receive, capture, decode. The bulk of the profile.
Cellular, receive-only	gr-gsm (apt on three of four targets), QCSuper, the LTE decoders	Legality varies by jurisdiction — interception statutes rather than spectrum rules.
Cellular, transmit	srsRAN_4G, Osmocom core, osmo-trx, intrusive-lte-mme	Operates a network. Requires authorisation an ordinary user will not have.

Recommendation: one rf-security profile for 1.0 containing the analysis and audit group plus the receive-only cellular subset, with the legal framing docs/rf-security/ already requires — and cellular deferred as a named, undefined post-1.0 profile rather than folded in quietly.

That keeps the 1.0 profile honest about what it is, keeps gr-gsm — apt on Debian 13, Kali and Parrot, though not on Ubuntu 26.04, which is a capability- matrix row rather than a reason to drop it — and does not put a rogue base station one command away from a machine that also holds offensive tooling.

This is a recommendation. Q-008 is the maintainer's to answer, and the answer changes the profile's contents, not its name.

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Notes that affect sizing

The Blend's sdr task is 39 packages, of which 12 are soapysdr-module-*. Those are per-hardware backends, and a user with one dongle needs one of them. Skywave ships the full set for the same reason the Blend lists it — a live ISO cannot know what will be plugged in. We can.

Recommend installing soapysdr-tools plus the modules matching detected hardware, treating the rest as available-not-installed. That single decision removes 11 of the 12 from the common case, and it is now supported by two independent sources rather than one. This is a design requirement on M4, not a catalog nicety: profile resolution has to be able to consult detected hardware.

logging loses 2 packages on stable. The Blend task is 10 packages and only 8 install on Debian 13 — the missing ones are qlog, which overlaps.md picks as the recommended default, and not1mm. A profile whose recommended default does not install on the stable Debian base most of our targets derive from is a capability-matrix row, not a footnote — and overlaps.md needs to say so.

The Blend uses Recommends for almost every entry. Its metapackages are opt-out; our profiles are opt-in. Task membership means "belongs to this category", never "install this by default". Importing it directly would make every profile maximal.

Overlap is expected and correct. splat is in antenna and tools; cw, cwcp, xcwcp, aldo and morse are in morse and training. Per D-003 that is one tag appearing twice, not a modelling error.

nonamateur maps to listening, not to anything amateur. It mixes ADS-B, DAB, GNSS and utility decoding. It also contains dump1090-mutability, which overlaps.md supersedes with readsb and which does not install on Debian 13 anyway.