Wanted to give a technology front update as the season gets underway. ATAK now has a public release version (PR) that anyone can download and use. You can get it on the home page at www.takmaps.com It does strip away the ability for plugins. If you are government you can sign up at the same site for an account and get the ATAK Civilian version that has plugins and the plugins are available from the site.
So the PR version is first step to hopefully ATAK coming to the Playstore. iTAK is also getting another try. As far as wildland use it has a ton applications. It can ingest our current maps from the GIS unit (or from the ftp site) they just need to be converted from the pdf format to the geotiff format. I have found the quickest conversion is using freeware GIS program called QGIS. You open the pdf in QGIS and export as Tiff. ArcMap has this ability but ArcPro does not (gofigure) so I have been using QGIS successfully and its super fast. I am hoping as the ATAK popularity grows Situation Units/GIS Units will host their daily map in this format for consumption Here is a link on how to do it. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R96ut1-Lbc7VmYBqkOMpaKwQ_oaNEweq/view?usp=sharing
The cool thing about ATAK is you can bring all your maps in as one map data package. So you could take the geotiff ops map, transportation, IR map, IR KML data, Branch map etc and put them in a folder then zip that folder up and then import it all at one time. No more downloading each map separately. This folder could be hosted by the IMT cloud and local network file distribution systems we have all been used to i.e. dropbox, googledrive, box.com etc etc. Hoping the IMTs can add this to their workflow. Would maybe add 10 minutes to what they currently do now.
So for ATAK to be really bitchen and collaborative you are hooked to other users via network connection to a TAK server or using TeamConnect which is basically a hosted TAK server you pay a yearly fee to use. Some people build their own TAK servers some pay others to set up a TAK server for them some use TeamConnect. Here is the Team Connect website https://goteamconnect.com/
So if your connected into a server you can share data with other users. Send shapes, chat etc. If you arent connected you can still use ATAK with gotennas or beartooth. Think off grid mesh network. You can also use ATAK offline like you currently use Avenza and its still very powerful.
So back to the map. You can reduce the transparency so you can see base imagery below it. Custom Base maps are xml maps you can import. ATAK comes with some base maps but if you want google hybrid or host of others I have it here in this folder for you. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v4drGf0xTUEp9qRCOVxMcfRAy63rKSyX
You can cache areas for offline use. Bring in KML network links from MODIS, VIIRS etc. ATAK has a whole host of measuring tools, tracks, lines, polygons for drawing etc. All the core wildland symbology for points. It can export these points in a variety of formats including kml, kmz, shapefile, gpx etc. You can load terrain elevation models and get 3D imagery. I am hitting the highlights here there is a ton of stuff. Here is a little video we did with samsung shows some of this stuff.
The Colorado Center of Excellence https://www.cofiretech.org has created some cool ATAK starter youtube videos. These go from "Ive never used Android (I was in that boat on the Mendocino Complex when a guy from the USFS named Eric Aselin called me about this thing called ATAK…the rest is history) to getting some of the tools going. If you join takmaps.com they have a whole other host of video resources for all the tools as well. Last video shows off what you can do with geospatial video in ATAK as well and live feeds from a UAS thats flying in ATAK. Hope this was informative.
AJ
