Hey folks- I've released **MeshCore TAK Bridge 0.1.0**, a free, open-source Android app (GPL-3.0) from Colorado Mesh. It links a MeshCore LoRa radio to ATAK on the same phone, with no plugin and no network.

The app talks to a MeshCore companion radio over Bluetooth and runs a small TAK server on the phone, bound to loopback. In ATAK you add one server: `127.0.0.1`, port `8087`, TCP, SSL off. That's it, with no certificates or data packages. Because it only speaks the standard TAK server protocol, it works with any ATAK version and doesn't need rebuilding when ATAK updates.

What you see in ATAK:

- Mesh nodes that share a position appear as markers: companion radios as team members (your choice of team colour), repeaters and room servers as installations (optionally with an icon-set icon), sensors as sensors. You can filter by type and last-heard age, and markers refresh so they don't go stale.

- Each mesh channel appears as a contact you chat with in ATAK's own chat screen. They all start with `#`, so they sit together at the top of the contact list.

- You can direct-message companion nodes by opening their contact, with delivery acknowledgement and retries.

Why a bridge and not a plugin: 1) It speaks only the standard TAK server protocol, so it isn't tied to an ATAK version, 2) It also never writes to the radio: no channels added, no settings, contacts or clock changed, 3) It also mirrors the way we are trying to integrate TAK with the Colorado Mesh Client software, and 4) It is simple.

A few things I learned along the way, in case they're useful to anyone else:

- ATAK only sends chat to a contact it can reach, and it addresses replies to that contact rather than to a GeoChat room. So each mesh channel had to be a contact, not a room.

- Bind to `127.0.0.1` explicitly. Android's default loopback is `::1`, and ATAK refused it.

- ATAK polls the server's web API on 8080 for contacts, groups and feeds when it connects, so the bridge answers those with empty lists to keep ATAK quiet.

Some current limitations: Android only, one ATAK client per phone, and MeshCore's message lengths (about 133 bytes on a channel, 160 direct). Sharing ATAK points, routes or drawings over the mesh is out of scope for this version.

I've tested it on a Pixel 9 Pro and a Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 3. If you have MeshCore hardware and try it on another device, I'd love a quick device report on GitHub, whether it works or not.

- Download (signed APK): https://github.com/Colorado-Mesh/meshcore-tak-bridge/releases/latest

- Source, setup and design notes: https://github.com/Colorado-Mesh/meshcore-tak-bridge

Not affiliated with the TAK Product Center or MeshCore. – Bud, W0RMT

hey guys

I hope you can help me out a bit . am trying to connect my multiband radio HARRIS 7850 to the ATAK to use it's GPS . any idea how and if this is possible !!

thanks

I see that the Gotenna Pro X is going for around $250 on Ebay. Is this still a supported and working radio? I know I will need to get a frequency coordination but just making sure there is nothing in that price range with better reliability than meshtastic. My use case is riding UTV's in the woods and keeping track of folks. Meshtastic seems to work ok for tracking but fails on messages very often.

Fieldwatch 1.1.23 just got more useful on your map. 🛰️

Fieldwatch already detects drones, decodes their Remote ID, and plots the drone track and pilot location in TAK. Now it also watches your phone's own GPS for possible jamming and spoofing. When it hits, your marker in TAK gets flagged so your whole team sees it right away.

Runs on the same Android device as ATAK. Free, open source, receive-only, and fully offline. The only official release is on the GitHub releases page.

github.com/OffGridPete/Fieldwatch

(This is a technical question related to TAK usage. Apologies if I'm posting in the wrong place.)

I was wondering if someone could help me out with understanding the fundamentals of TAK, or point me to relevant documentation. I'm a computer science researcher interested in working with TAK, and I've got a local server up and running in a VM. My core problem is that I can't tell if things are broken or working as expected.

My local server has an admin dashboard which provides WebTAK, with a map of the world. On that map, I can see a marker at 0, 0 which apparently corresponds to the admin who is connected via the website. I then have a client, which connects to the server using the admin certificate and sends a COT message. A corresponding marker pops up in WebTAK, but it disappears if I refresh the page, or if I open a new WebTAK instance after sending the message. It's as if either the message isn't being saved anywhere, or WebTAK is failing to retrieve it.

So I was hoping someone could tell me if (1) this is expected behavior, (2) this indicates a likely bug in WebTAK, or (3) there's some more general issue with my COT message or my TAK server.

I'd appreciate any help with this, or a pointer to somewhere else where I should be asking. Let me know if I need to provide more info. Thank you.

EDIT: Here's an example of a typical COT message. Note that the stale time is several hours in the future.

<event version="2.0" uid="swift-agent-06" type="a-f-G-U-C" how="m-g" time="2026-10-08T18:44:14.752Z" start="2026-10-08T18:44:14.752Z" stale="2026-10-09T03:04:14.752Z">

  <point lat="38.8951" lon="-77.0364" hae="0.0" ce="10.0" le="10.0"/>

  <detail>

<contact callsign="SwiftBot6"/>

<remarks>Swift TAK CoT test event</remarks>

<__group name="Cyan" role="Team Member"/>

  </detail>

</event>

My name is Gaston Mazzei, tech lead at MarsupialRF, an Argentine startup of physicists. We work on RF and SIGINT, including PCBs, RF imaging, directional comms, and scientific instruments. Drone detection is an area we're exploring, given some members' background in covert ops.

We're looking at bistatic radar for battlefield visibility against advanced drone links — fiber optic, 4G, Starlink

A short operator-oriented anonymous poll has been made available, as to orient the design with proper feedback. https://forms.gle/gwd12nhzYisgpzmH7

It asks about your detector, TinySA, bearing, false positives, RF environment, and piggyback testing. No sensitive info, no sales. You can see our work on Instagram: https://instagram.com/marsupial.rf

Thank you for your kind time and attention.
— Gaston

Questions may take time to be answered on this platform as it's weekly-monitored. Technical requests can be channeled to [engineering@marsupialrf.com](mailto:engineering@marsupialrf.com) and sales to [sales@marsupialrf.com](mailto:sales@marsupialrf.com).

Just pushed new variant of WearTAK. Brings the family to 4. T Watch coming soon! Note, all of these are free forever with an also free TAK.gov account.

- WearTAK-WearOS (the best one with plugins and freestanding, "the ATAK of watches"). Want the best WT? Get a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2!

- WearTAK-Tracker (like TAK Tracker! Alerts, PLI, and physio)

- WearTAK-iOS (nearly all functionality of - WearTAK-WearOS but no plugins and requires a paired phone)

- WearTAK-Garmin (much lighter function due to Monkey C restrictions and requires a paired phone)

Bloodhounding to pastry on apple watch WearTAK and seeing other tak clients. Reply here and I'll add you to test flight.

https://testflight.apple.com/join/UmM8AkNk

Ragazzi, good morning. My father and I were analyzing the Alert button and came up with the idea of a small plugin for quick, visual communication with our teammates.

There are moments when we are unable to notify our teammates, because for technical reasons we cannot make a call, send a chat message, or communicate via radio. So, when we need to let the team know that at that moment we cannot pay attention to the chat or talk on the radio, it would be useful to have a plugin that allows us — for example, by pressing the volume-down button twice — to set our marker on the map directly to red. Or, possibly, to create a small dot next to our marker that turns red, or even to make a small "muted" icon appear inside our marker on the map, etc. This lets all teammates understand that at that moment we cannot talk: because I'm driving, because I want a moment of radio silence, because I'm emptying my bladder (lol), because I'm in a quick brief during an emergency scenario and I'm talking to someone — in short, because I have a sudden need and cannot pay attention to the chat for brief moments, and all these kinds of things.

It should obviously be considered a momentary status marker, which does not disable anything for me as an operator: that is, if I wanted to make a PTT call or send a message, I could. In fact, it would be nice to tie the status to these cases and have it turn off automatically when it detects that we open a channel or send a chat message (but I realize that's an extreme idea, though it would be cool). But let's stay humble: implementing a menu for manual deactivation would be the way to go.

A timer could also be added — 5, 10, 30 minutes, 1 hour or more — that when it expires returns our status to normal (this in case of forgetfulness).

A momentary need that I would like to communicate quickly.

Emergency version: obviously it would be nice to program other functions. For example: with 4 presses of volume-down, one could activate a sort of emergency "enemies on my position, help" or "they've got me, help"; with volume-down held for 3 seconds, "help, I'm hurt, I can't walk", "I've had an accident, help". In short, there's a wide range of factors and modes — I'll leave that to the more experienced programmers. Obviously the choices should be customizable, or one could even write a small message like "run, rendezvous at xxxxyyyy".

In these two cases, it sends an alert with vibration to all teammates, like the Alert application already present, but with greater potential — that is, situational clarity and information.

The ATAK Alert is interesting, but you're always forced to activate it from the menu, and in a real emergency it doesn't give you the possibility to write info: teammates only see "emergency" and that's it, which personally doesn't make much sense.

What do you think? Would it be a nice thing?

Buongiorno ragazzi.

Qualcuno sa dirmi se esiste un plugin che faccia visualizzare case /edifici in 3D con altezze approssimativamente reali?

Grazie a tutti

Used the plugin from github and it worked flawlessly twice for me before. Now I can't get PLI or contacts to pop up. I've tried resetting and reinstalling and going over my uvpro settings to no avail. Anyome have any solutions or experience?

Lame joke intro: Despite the best Apple a granny smith, not a watch, I started work on this earlier today—spurred by conversations with several Coast Guard users at Sentinel 5 in San Diego this week.

Repo: https://github.com/aegorsuch/weartak-ios

(As with everything I make, the primary repo is TAK Forge with Unlimited Rights granted and free for the community, forever).

Architecture Woes: Just like WearTAK-Garmin, iOS architecture limits mean it cannot form a direct streaming connection to a TAK server. It relies on the phone in the middle. Most core functions are up and running in the simulator I want to wire it into TAK Aware as the preferred iOS phone client.

Call to Action: I’m putting together a release build soon for beta testing. Who’s interested? Drop a comment or send me a DM to get added to the test build!

Last week I shared a post about pre-cut GeoPackages of OSM and NAIP data over CONUS for TAK users. This week I want to share how we've been tackling another major bottleneck at the edge: how do you stream live drone feeds and multi-terabyte archives across tactical MANET radios (Silvus, TrellisWare, MPU5) without choking your network?

Our team has been providing high resolution imagery and elevation data for TAK users for almost fifteen years and this year we built the Axis Personal Map Server specifically to solve this problem for vehicle kits, Toughbooks, and TOCs. It's a lightweight, native C/C++ Windows binary that runs entirely air-gapped with zero cloud backhaul, remote telemetry, or external DNS dependencies.

What's under the hood:

• Native ATAK / WinTAK Integration: Stream via standard map source XML configurations on Android or direct Layer Manager dialogs in WinTAK, with zero bridge software required.

• Bandwidth Preservation: On-demand tile streaming keeps RF channels clear for tactical voice and video instead of saturating the mesh with large file syncs.

• Open Standards: Native OGC compliance (WMS 1.1.1/1.3.0, WMTS 1.0.0, XYZ, KML) supporting vector, raster, and elevation models out of the box for QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, and Common Operational Picture (COP) systems.

You can check out the attached 7-page technical sheet for full architecture details or grab the 15-day free trial (no key required) on our website listed in the slide show.

Hi everyone, my name is Spartan, I'm Inaky's son. I've been helping my dad with posts, etc. these past few days. So now you know I'm here too, lol I have been observing Atak for a long time and I have noted the lack of a training structure in Italy, regarding the potential of the instrument, in relation to our police forces, firefighters, etc., mountain rescue and so on. Being a mountain enthusiast and having friends who work in these fields, do you know if there is the possibility of taking courses to become an accredited ATAK trainer, so as to propose my knowledge acquired in these structures?

Thank you

Has anyone successfully exported the toolbar? When I try it on two different devices with (v5.8.0.3 and 5.8.0.4) it hangs on processing the data package. I left it all night like this and no worky. When I cancel out it says it got exported, but there is no file there when I look for it. There isn't even an atak directory on the SD card. I tried creating the path first but still does the same. There is no apparent option I can find to choose where it gets exported to.

Good morning, my son and I discovered a very basic app in the style of ATAK called Atlas... nothing special that ATAK doesn’t already do, but they came up with something really interesting: the viewing direction of allies on the map. In addition to the classic round marker that represents us and our teammates, they added a field-of-view cone to let others understand the direction in which teammates are looking. Clearly, this makes sense if the phone is being held in some kind of chest mount or in hand while navigating. But I was wondering if anyone had ever thought of creating a plugin that could show a kind of directional arrow indicating where the phone is pointed, to improve understanding of teammates’ movements as well. Or maybe the creators of ATAK have never thought of it either.

What do you think?

Looking to be better understand key needs, frustrations and pain points with 3-4 TAK users who primarily use the app via desktop/WinTAK/TAKX. How might the experience be more efficient, helpful, and/or more enjoyable? 30 mins sometime in the next week.

Folks,

We're hosting a TAK hackathon in Lund, Sweden on Nov 28th. Open to everyone, uniform or not. You can join as a completely newbie to TAK just to play around with it as a user, or an experienced developer.

https://taklabs-2.eventbrite.com

Hey guys, just heard about this sub today. I am just getting into ATAK for civilian use. I am not very radio savvy yet, so please forgive my questions. I am looking to get a handheld radio that will integrate into ATAK in order to still work off grid/without cell support. I understand that military radios have support, and ATAK can pull GPS signal from the radio and share data without the cell infrastructure. Is this possible to do with civilian radios without spending hundreds of dollars? Based on my other criteria, the Baofeng DM 32 DMR seems like a reasonable choice for an entry level hand held. I appreciate any advice on breaking into this skill set.

Cheers.

WearTAK Release 5.8.0.3 is going live! What started as a nascent concept is now a core TAK product available across US service branches, federal partners like the USCG, and international allies like the UK MoD, at no cost to all with a free TPC account. NOTE: If you don't have an account with access, I can share you the APK and a tool I built to easily sideload.

The new update drops this Friday at 1700Z. Here is what’s inside:

TAK Server Channel Configuration – Direct channel management from your wrist.

BETA VPN Support – Route data securely through OpenVPN layer.

BETA WearTAK-Garmin – Expanding tactical capability to Garmin hardware.

How can you help?

Introductions: Connect us with new tactical or mission career fields.

Funding: Advocate for co-funding opportunities on active proposals.

Feedback: Drop your feature requests below or DM me.

Hey everyone! I've been tinkering a lot with meshtatic and ATAK, but after hours of research and trying I kinda gave up and decided to ask someone who has more knowledge than I do.

I play airsoft and every now and then we play in remote areas where we don't have 4G or Telephone coverage so we started to investigate Meshtatic and ATAK.

The objective:

The idea would be for two teams to use a LoRa Meshtatic network (we place nodes all around the field) as means of communication and integrate it with ATAK so that the teams cannot see each other but able to see and communicate with their teammates. Let's say, teams blue and red use the same network (nodes) but they restrict GPS location just to their own respective teams. Reds see only reds and blues only see blues. Also a main channel for everyone would be great just for communication (just for safety).

The tests:

I went two ways, first with ATAK 5.8 which uses a self hosted ATAK server, the issue is that if I connect to a network like medium_fast and create my channel I can see the location of every node even though I created a private channel and set it to primary (0). All the nodes are seen as cyan team.

Then I tried with ATAK 5.6 and the Meshtatic plugin, I was able to see each other but some nodes from the public channel still apear on my map on ATAK. I was able to talk between teammates and even send CoT information and everything but I don't know how to solve the "blue don't see the red and viceversa".

Additional info:

Right now I'm using Meshtatic 2.7.13 and ATAK 5.6 with the latest plugin.

Set my private channel as 0 (Primary)

Using public channel medium_fast as secondary not sharing gps on that channel only in my private one.

If anyone has any insights, please comment them and you can help enlighten me in order to solve this. Thank you all!