Move, Shoot, and Communicate with ATAK (and alternatives)

not exactly sure how to start this video but in the title are the words shoot move and communicate which are three really important skills any one of these skills is very helpful on its own but when you combine them together you get capability that is more than the sum of its parts now here at TRX we've talked about communication one time and we've talked about shooting a few times we haven't really talked about moving though we talked about moving while shooting which is important but I want to talk a little bit more about the larger situational awareness being able to figure out larger moves being able to figure out where you are which in Tennessee is a little bit tricky because all of Middle Tennessee looks exactly like this being able to figure out where you need to be to accomplish your goals and then how you're actually going to move from where you are to where you need to be which again in Tennessee is a little tricky because most of it looks like this now John level has an excellent video on beginning land nav that you should go and watch their shoot move communicate and move and communicate are by far more important if you're in the right place at the right time you can maneuver into position now in John's video he talks about some of the tools that you can use to do the move part ideally you have at the very basic a compass and a map and you're also going to need grid squares lots of grid squares but if you have the map and the compass you can figure out where you are where you want to move and if you have a radio then you can coordinate with other guys that have maps and compasses and for the last hundred years or so that is the way that small units have been able to coordinate what they are trying to do and it still works but there are some new tools that can help with the move and communicate part and the one that is most commonly used in the United States military is something called a tack and that's we're gonna be talking about in this video the first half of the video is talking about a tack itself and then in the second half of the video we're going to be talking about alternatives so a tack stands for Android tactical Assault kit there's also a wind tack and windows legend tells of an attack which I think was removed from the App Store because I probably the Chinese government complained to Tim Apple I bet it was something like that anyone among the Android versions there are several variants there's one for the United States military one for militaries that we sort of trust one for militaries we don't trust one for a civilian firefighter law enforcement things like that and then just recently we got a publicly released version for people like you and me which kind of happened against the government's will but that's a long story now of course when the civilian market uses a tech the acronym magically changes it's no longer the Android tactical assault kit it magically becomes the Android team awareness kit because civilians are not allowed assault rifles or assault software but what a tech does is extremely cool at its heart it is a powerful mapping tool you can load all kinds of GIS data satellite maps elevation maps all kinds of mapping data into one place and view them in 3d space and then you can overlay other images whether they have GIS data in them or not or even 3d models and then you can add map markers and navigable routes and sensor data on top of all of that terrain is extremely cool but the other part is the communication framework inside of a tech you can see other ATAC users that are on the same net you can see their positions on the map but you can also share markers and routes with them and you can control all of your radio traffic with them and with other people from inside of the app so all the tools for small unit tactical stuff or if you're a civilian small unit team awareness stuff is all inside of the app and you can do it all in one place and on the military side they added the ability to send targeting data to mordor guys and artillery teams and close air support and then because the system was working so well and it was so fast and cheap to develop they kind of added everything to it so some of this is built into a TAC some of this is supported with plugins which we'll talk about later there are tools for tracking moving targets there are tools for indirect firing solutions there are tools for airborne operations there's the ability to plug into more and more pieces of the military infrastructure and talk to more and more different military units and control more and more of the military infrastructure so there's the ability to see satellite feeds and security camera feeds and drone camera feeds and now you can actually fly drones and adjust drone waypoints from inside of here or even drive bomb disposal robots from inside of this one app attack started out being a very powerful solution to a pretty small set of problems and it is now the solution to a ton of different things it feels a little bit like the f-35 project which started out being one aircraft doing multiple jobs but now the number of jobs that has to do is made the program kind of big and unwieldy but ultimately everything that a TAC does can be divided into the move and communicates categories on the move side it is a powerhouse and it has everything that I need from mapping it has offline maps it has online maps it has elevation charting it has Road routing and the ability to import basically every file type that I've ever heard of I can draw shapes and markers and I can export those and a bunch of file types and import those into other things and it also lets me combine a lot of different maps and files and export that as a complete package which then I could transport to other people's phones on a microSD card the only other way for me to share a tech data with users is to run an a tax server which is so difficult and complicated that people are already building a free version of the server which is in super early alpha mode and there's kind of a way where you can set up a VPN and everybody inside of the VPN can chat and see each other's positions but that all requires the internet and I really want offline comms now on the communication side a tech is built to do offline comms very well but kind of only if it's already plugged into a military infrastructure so for example the only native radio connection that I can select in here is the Harris PRC 152 which is an $8,000 radio and I don't have one now on eBay there are replicas of this radio but spoiler alert they don't work in the communication video on radio that I did whenever that was I talked about how the military solution may not be the best solution for you and so don't buy into that system if you cannot support the entire infrastructure you need to come up with a radio solution that's going to fit the actual infrastructure that you have access to this cows evac point allows me to select a ton of different things alike the equipment that is required the type of patient that we have and how they have to be moved whether or not their enemy combatants or children or apparently there's no option for child soldier but all of these things that I'm communicating to the people that are responding assumes that I am using a military radio to communicate military information to medical guys that are part of a military system it's far less useful for me as a civilian now the good news is that a tech is rapidly becoming the de facto coordinating tool for first responders law enforcement firefighters and it's probably going to come to medical professionals as well in a big way now that still doesn't solve the radio problem but the good news is that I comm motorola somewhere and go tena are making radios now that talk to the civilian version of a tech the bad news is that you don't have the civilian version of a tech you have the public release version of a tech which has disabled plug-ins entirely which is how those radios talk to a TAC in the first place also those radios are pretty expensive now t-rex could make a commercial radio solution to work we can get the licenses and fill out the paperwork and we could even afford at least one of these radios for me anyway but we're trying to build a larger more accessible cheaper community solution for the whole thing now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't experiment with a tech I think everybody with Android should go and download it right now at the URL that is somewhere on the screen and even if you're a poor iPhone user like our unfortunate cameraman here I would actually consider going to eBay and getting a used beat-up Android phone just to experiment with it it is a very unique opportunity to have a window into what is very widely used military software and see exactly what the features do it's a little bit like having your very own f-35 just don't be surprised if after playing with the f-35 for a while you discover that it's not actually your favorite daily driver so let's talk about some of the alternatives and I actually want to go back to the shop I know it looks like we're in the absolute middle of nowhere down here but the top of that hill is right where the t-rex shop is so that's where we're headed we're gonna get away from the ticks and we're gonna throw some of this gear on the table and talk about it alright comment down below how many ticks you think we got from being in the woods for 30 minutes alright so alternatives to a tech obviously Maps compass still work and you still need to watch that John Lovell video standalone GPS units still work and there's a bunch of other pieces of software that you can run on a phone sorry about the mess but on the phone software you got a bunch of options that give you really important things like topo maps there's Gaia which a bunch of the guys have been using there's base map which I have used several times myself there's fat map which actually looks the best of all of them in my opinion but the downside with all of these pieces of software is even though they do allow you to download maps so that you can use them offline each one has a subscription-based model where you have an account on their servers it's not that I'm opposed to paying for software I just don't like the idea of the phone needing to phone home occasionally when you might actually need it in an emergency where there is no internet and I'm not sure how all of these pieces of software are going to work in the future so that brings me to my favorite piece of offline software which is osmond which uses as its base vector files from the OpenStreetMap project but you can easily add topo lines hillshade a whole bunch of offline options you can have online satellite maps displayed underneath this and you can download those and use them offline but even without the satellite imagery you still have an awful lot of data buildings points of interest power lines railroad tracks river flow information all very useful stuff there's even offline Wikipedia articles which contain very interesting information about geographic features or businesses there's Road routing which also gives you elevation and turn data the markup of the map is extremely basic but you can save all the GPX files and share those basically Ottoman lets you do everything that you could do with Google Maps and everything that you can do with paper maps this is a very small town over here but I have actually more information about some of the stuff down here the swimming pool and the Thompson Park is all laid out and the other neat thing about these vector maps is the entirety of the United States at this level of detail is somewhere between five and six gigabytes I believe so very easy to store on your phone all the time now originally when I started making this video I was thinking primarily about rural navigation because that's where I live but recent events have reminded me that stuff happens inside of big cities too and it would be good to make sure that you actually can do Road based navigation as well as off-road navigation from a mapping standpoint or on the move side of the equation osmond does almost everything that a tag does no 3d but easier to use easier to teach people how to use and easier to set up on other people's phones like a tack you can store the program files and all the map files on a micro SD card and transfer that to other people's phones and install it and get them up and running with no internet and with no servers required which is good because on the communication side Osmund is far more limited than a tag is there is a plugin that allows you to communicate your location using the telegram network which is encrypted and unless you see all of your people on the map wherever they are but still requires the internet and I am really looking for an internet free off-grid communication system that works and of course you can still just use your radios to tell each other where you are but there's no reason that it can't be more sophisticated than that so on the radio video I've had a lot of people ask if I actually expect the internet to go down and I am not expecting it to go down in a global way but we've already had storms that knocked out cell towers here in this part of Tennessee twice this year and it was during storms when we really wanted to communicate with people and see if they were okay and then there is the possibility that there's a lot of I don't know civil unrest going on and every other country that's not the US has manipulated the communication capability of protesters in order to control what they're actually capable of doing obviously that would never happen in this country nor would private companies control what people are saying on the Internet in any way but you know just in case it's nice to be able to have offline communication capability so what I have right here is some ham radio software called APRs droid there are a ton of ham radio software packages that run on Windows and Linux but I would like something that can be mobile while we're talking about move shoot and communicate so what we're going to do here is send our positions from one phone to the other using just audio that comes through the radio and sounds like this the other phone will hear that audio through the radio and we'll be able to interpret it as geographical coordinates and if I switch to the map mode we can see the not the real GPS positions but the fake GPS positions that I typed into these phones so that we could see where they are on a map so APRs droid gives me part of the communication solution that I want and osmond gives me all of the mapping and move solutions that I want so what I really would like somebody to develop is a plugin that allows oddmund to see APRs packets that come in over the audio interface of a cheap Chinese radio now the closest thing to what I'm actually looking for is the go tena pro the go tena pro is a 5 watt UHF VHF radio that does mesh networking that does encryption that does some very very cool stuff however it's about 850 bucks for the one that works with a tach and it doesn't even work with the version of a tach that I have on the other hand this is already a 5 watt UHF VHF radio and I already have the phone that could technically do the mesh networking and the encryption part if the software in the phone were capable of doing it so right now we have the opportunity to create very interesting important tools to allow people to do very interesting important things APR 7 2015 1 of the ways that I decided to put on the screen and let me know so in addition to sharing map location and text messages back and forth another thing that you could add with this 20 dollar Bao Fang radio and this 20 dollar belvane cable is a push-to-talk button that sends your voice from the Bluetooth headset through the radio and he would have voice comms with other people so you'd hear voice communications through the earbuds and you would see packet data decrypted on the screen that would be something that even go tena pro cannot do at the moment so I actually have three tools that I really like I like Osment and its ability to have a ton of map data offline in a very easy to use format that gives me incredible capability and I like APRs droid because even though it's a little finicky it allows me to talk long ranges using cheap radios that I already owned with no infrastructure and I like a tack because even though it's a little bit difficult to work with it has some incredible capability and it shows the power of software attack in the last five years of its development has been doing things that the military has been trying to do with hardware for years and years and years before that fell action points if you have an Android phone download attack now if you have an iPhone consider buying a used Android phone this one is that's a huge long rabbit trail I was going to talk about how this phone is set up but that's really unnecessary [Music] so my recommendation to you guys is download a tack if you're on Android download osmond and get maps for it so that you're prepared in an emergency download APRs droid and play with it if you have some bow faying radios to mess with technically any radio will work as long as you can figure out how to plug it into your phone and if you are a software developer I'd like to encourage you guys to consider building some tools that tie some of these things together so that we as a community have a little bit more access to be communicating and to be coordinating and if you're curious the number of ticks that we have found so far is 12 12 ticks but I'm sure there's more [Music] you

Channel: T.REX ARMS

Views: 386,390

Rating: 4.9595623 out of 5

Keywords: ATAK, civtak, team awareness kit, tactical assault kit, land nav, land navigation, emergency communication, emcomm, commo, move shoot communicate, Isaac botkin, T.Rex Arms, trexarms, aprsdroid, osmand, osmand+, offline maps, offline mapping, offgrid communication

Id: WXuQERL_e8M

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nuggsonnuggs]

From someone who has used the full version extensively, this is quite watered down. One of the biggest disadvantages is the freshness of sat imagery. The full version can often have sat imagery that is only a few hours old..

[u/TrunksDBZgod]

I would love to use that system with my friends when we’re training and what not but it’s only on Android

[u/PusherofCarts]

Wouldn’t this system be rendered useless if there is any disruption to cell service?

[u/shifty480]

I read somewhere, there are rumors the military may switch away from Android. It didn’t say iOS specifically, but idk what else it’d be besides proprietary hardware, but that’d be a waste.

[u/reubadoob]

www.takmaps.com for download

[u/Irish_McJesus]

I've been playing around with CivTak for a while now, it's pretty solid, but apparently all my larper friends seem to have either not enough free space to download, or are running incompatible phones, so I can't really test out all the features properly. Other than that it's great so long as your phone can buffer in the sat picture quick enough

[u/SunneSonne]

What about Canada? Don’t just leave me with a garmin gps; although admin gps are 10/10 for actual location awareness. Still, I would rather get android app for true topography and just download data used in gis