Lately you’ve in all probability seen a few photographs of tablets and smartphones strapped to the armor of troopers, particularly US Special Forces. The first app loaded on most of these gadgets is ATAK or Android Tactical Assault Package. It permits the soldier to view and share geospatial info, like pleasant and enemy positions, hazard areas, casualties, and so forth. As a method of working with geospatial info, its civilian functions grew to become obvious, corresponding to firefighting and law-enforcement, so CivTAK/ATAK-Civ was created and open sourced in 2020. Since ATAK-Civ was meant for these not carrying military-issued weapons, the acronym magically turn out to be the Android Workforce Consciousness Package. This caught the eye of the open supply group, so right now we’ll dive into the rising TAK ecosystem, its quirks, and potential use circumstances.
The TAK ecosystem contains ATAK for Android, iTAK for iOS, WinTAK for Home windows, and a rising variety of servers, plugins, and instruments to increase performance. On the coronary heart of TAK lies the Cursor on Goal (CoT) protocol, an XML or Protobuf-based message format used to share info between shoppers and servers. This could embody a “goal’s” location, space, and route info, sensor knowledge, textual content messages, or medevac info, to call just a few. Purchasers, like ATAK, can course of this info as required, and in addition generate CoT knowledge to share with different shoppers. A TAK consumer can be a sensor node, or a easy node-Pink circulate. This implies the TAK could be a actually highly effective device for monitoring, monitoring, or controlling the issues round you.
ATAK is a strong mapping device by itself. It could actually show and plot info on a 3D map, calculate a heading to a goal, arrange a geofence, and function a messaging app between staff members. Apart from utilizing it for outside navigation, I’ve used two different built-in mapping options extensively. Viewshed means that you can plan wi-fi node areas, and verify line-of-sight their line-of-sight protection. The “sensor” (digital camera) markers are helpful for planning protection of CCTV installations. Nonetheless, ATAK begins to actually shine once you add plugins to increase options, and hyperlink shoppers in a community to share info.
Networking
To permit networking between shoppers, you both must arrange a multicast community or a central server that each one the shoppers hook up with. A preferred choice for multicast communication is to arrange a free ZeroTier VPN, or another VPN. For client-server topologies, there are a number of open supply TAK servers accessible that may be put in on a Raspberry Pi or another machine, together with the official TAK server that was lately open sourced on GitHub. FreeTakServer may be prolonged with its built-in API and elective Node-RED server, and contains an easy-to-use “zero-touch” installer. Taky, is one other light-weight Python-based server. All these servers additionally embody knowledge package deal servers, for distributing bigger data packs to shoppers.
Plugins
If an web connection will not be accessible the place you’re going, there are a number of off-grid networking plugins accessible. HAMMER acts as an audio modem to ship CoTs utilizing low-cost Baofeng radios. Atak-forwarder works with LoRa-based Meshtastic radios, or you need to use APRS-TAK with ham radios.
Plugins may pull knowledge from different sources, like ADSB knowledge from an RTL-SDR, or the video feed and site info from a drone. Most of the at present accessible plugins will not be open supply and are solely accessible by way of the TAK.gov web site after agreeing to phrases and circumstances from the US federal authorities. Happily, this implies there’s a variety of house for open supply alternate options to develop.
For additional exploration, the staff behind the FreeTAK server maintains an in depth checklist of TAK-related instruments, plugins, data sources, and {hardware}.
Tricks to get began
On the time of writing, ATAK is considerably extra mature than iTAK and WinTAK, so it’s the best choice if you wish to begin exploring. iTAK is definitely a bit simpler to begin utilizing instantly, however it’s lacking a variety of options and might’t load plugins.
Opening ATAK on Android for the primary time will rapidly turn out to be obvious that it isn’t precisely intuitive to make use of. I received’t bore you with a whole tutorial however will share a few ideas I’ve discovered useful. Firstly, RTFM. The utilization of lots of the options and instruments will not be self-evident, so the included PDF handbook (Settings > Help > ATAK Paperwork) may turn out to be useful. There may be additionally an extended checklist of settings to customise, that are quite a bit simpler to navigate with the search operate within the prime bar of the Settings menu.
No maps are included in ATAK by default, so obtain and import [Joshua Fuller]’s ATAK-Maps package deal. This offers ATAK an in depth checklist of map sources to work with, together with Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps. ATAK may cache maps and imagery for offline use. ATAK solely has low-resolution elevation knowledge included by default, however you’ll be able to obtain and import extra detailed elevation knowledge from the USGS web site.
To attach with others fascinated about TAK you can too try the TAK Neighborhood Discord server.
Have you ever performed round with something within the TAK ecosystem? Share your expertise and concepts within the feedback beneath.
