Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) Plugin
Custom plugin connecting the goTenna communications system with the US Government’s premier situational awareness application.
The development of the ATAK plugin for goTenna was the first external collaborative product development effort for which I am incredibly thankful to the sharp crew at DARPA and AFRL for taking the initial lead on. The relationship between goTenna and ATAK began in early 2015 a few months before the shipping of the goTenna V1 model. Through a bit of luck and coincidence one of the DARPA program leads happened to be in NYC and reached out to us after having seen our crowdfunding campaign online.
When the two of us met in the dungeon-like basement of our small offices in Williamsburg, he told me about this government-sponsored Android app called “ATAK” which he told me was a game-changing situational awareness app already in use by wide portions of the US government, particularly within the SOF community. At the time we were underwater trying to launch our base product so my technical team didn’t have the capacity to handle an external integration, but luckily this program lead volunteered some of their program resources to build their own proof-of-concept integration, if I could get him an early-access version of our software development kit (SDK),
Luckily, that was something we had almost ready to go and after a few weeks of further development, we were able to provide him with prototype units and the SDK. As an acolyte of the “simpler is better” design philosophy, I had insisted on absolute simplicity in our SDK, which appeared to be rewarded when the DARPA/AFRL team was able to produce a working baseline prototype integration in about a week. When the goTenna V1 product shipped a few months later we found out that it was bulk purchased by teams that used it together with ATAK for operations in conflict zones around the world.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive as operators were suddenly able to use their preferred operations app without having to shell out $20,000+ for a big, bulky, restricted legacy tactical radio. However as happy as the users were, the integration was very basic with only baseline locations and chat being possible.
In 2017 as we geared up for the release of the Pro suite of products, it became clear to me that the penetration and momentum of the ATAK system was critical to goTenna’s growth. For us to capitalize on this we had to create a much more advanced integration that we could put our name behind. At this time I petitioned our partners at DARPA/AFRL for permission to become official developers for the ATAK program and build our own ATAK plugin from the ground up. They were happy to oblige.
Their original plugin was deprecated and our new plugin which supported all goTenna hardware, 2525 symbology, group/individual chats, signal scanning, cursor-on-target, custom encryption, frequency tuning, and many more features was developed by our team completely in-house bringing the ATAK plugin from a proof-of-concept parter integration, up to a fully supported flagship product.
You can learn more about ATAK at www.gotennapro.com.
