SOOTHSAYER ATAK Plugin

This plugin is a tactical client to the CloudRF / SOOTHSAYER radio planning API.

Presently, users can task the Area, Multisite, Points and Satellite APIs to make heatmaps and links for RF systems using templates from a user's account.

Signed APK

The latest release (15th Nov 24) supports ATAK 5.2 on Android 14 and is signed by TPC.

Older releases are here.

Points of Contact

• Issue board: https://github.com/Cloud-RF/SOOTHSAYER-ATAK-plugin
• Developer email: [email protected]

This is a fully supported, genuine, privately funded, open source application by a UK SME!

Ports Required

Outgoing: TCP 443

Equipment Required

• An Android phone running ATAK-CIV available in Play store

• Either a CloudRF account or a SOOTHSAYER server

For operation on a private LAN you require a SOOTHSAYER server which can be deployed as a VM or as containers.

Equipment Supported

ATAK 5.1.x

Documentation

https://cloudrf.com/documentation/06_atak_plugin.html

Quickstart

If you don't fancy building it from source, you can find a ready made APK release under the releases section. Copy the .apk file to your phone.

In ATAK, add and activate the plugin if it isn't already listed via the plugins menu.

To use the plugin, login to your account first. For CloudRF the service should be https://cloudrf.com and for a SOOTHSAYER server it should be your server's IP/FQDN and protocol eg. https://192.168.1.3

Your templates from your account will download at this point. You may also side load templates as JSON files to your atak/SOOTHSAYER/templates folder on the SD card.

To simulate coverage and layers click + and then drag the marker. For more information see the user documentation.

Satellite coverage

Added in 1.4, this feature uses the new Satellite API to test a wide area for satellite visibility.

To use it, ensure you have coverage enabled in the plugin options and then enter the name of a satellite eg. OPTUS C1. Select a date/time and then drag the satellite marker to place it upon the earth.

An area of 1 million points will be tested against the API. The radius is relative to the resolution so at 2m = 1km, 10m = 5km, 20m = 10km.

Premium API features

Some CloudRF API features require a Silver account such as Multisite and Satellite coverage which uses a GPU. If you want to evaluate the plugin with a free or Bronze account you can slide the coverage layer slider to single which will perform a slower single-site CPU calculation. A private server has no restrictions.

Compilation

1. Open Plugin folder in Android studio
2. Open a terminal and issue ./gradlew assembleCivDebug --info

Developer Notes

You can follow these notes to complete a build of the plugin and have it working in a virtual Android environment with Android Studio. These notes have been written from the viewpoint of an Ubuntu machine. You may need to adjust for other systems if you are not using Ubuntu.

1. Install a legacy Java release like 8 or 11, but not 17. JDK 17 does not play well with old Java and doing this early on heads off build issues later.

2. Download Android studio https://developer.android.com/studio.

3. Unzip the download of Android studio, open a terminal in the folder then run bin/studio.sh to start.

4. Choose a standard setup and accept the terms for both packages, let it install APIs.

5. Fetch an ATAK CIV SDK release from https://tak.gov. You can find this by logging in and then navigating to "Products" > "ATAK-CIV". Select your version (this has been tested with "ATAK-CIV 4.8.1"). Scroll down on the page to the "Downloadable Resources" section and click on the "Developer Resources" and then download the ZIP of the SDK for the version you just specified.

6. Unzip the ATAK CIV release and you may wish to rename the folder to include the version eg. mv atak-civ atak-civ-x.x, this will allow you to better identify which version you are working with if you have multiple versions on your system.

7. If a samples directory doesn't exist in the ATAK CIV release then create one.

8. Copy a clone of this SOOTHSAYER-ATAK-plugin repository to the samples directory.

9. Open the SOOTHSAYER-ATAK-plugin directory you just copied in Android Studio.

10. If you have multiple Java versions on your system you may need to set the JDK version from the "File" > "Project Structure" menu.

11. Allow several minutes for Android Studio to download all dependencies and external libraries.

12. Open "Tools" > "Device "Manager" and create a Pixel 5 with Android Image version 28 (version 28 has been tested to work). At this point you may need to download the Android image if it doesn't already exist on your system. When on the "Verify Configuration" menu click on the "Show Advanced Settings" button and in the "Memory and Storage" section set the "VM heap" to 512MB.

13. Generate a debug.keystore - you can use default values for all of the prompts:

    keytool -genkey -v -keystore debug.keystore -storepass android -alias androiddebugkey -keypass android -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

14. In the "Device Manager" start the Pixel 5 image you created previously. This may take several minutes to fully start.

15. Take the atak.apk file which is included in the root directory of the ATAK version which you downloaded and then drag/drop it over the Pixel 5 device. This will install ATAK on the Pixel 5 device.

16. Load up the ATAK app in the Pixel 5 device.

17. Rotate the Pixel 5 device into landscape mode so that you can work with it easier.

18. Accept the EULA and allow all of the permissions which are prompted for the first time when you start ATAK.

19. When you are prompted for "TAK Device Setup" you can skip this and just press "Done".

20. Allow and enable the prompt which disabled battery optimisation.

21. If all is working as expected then ATAK should be loaded and it should show "DEVELOPER BUILD" in red letters at the bottom of the viewer.

22. In Android Studio select "Run" > "Run app". This will build and compile the plugin. After a successful build you will be prompted on ATAK "Load plugin: SOOTHSAYER. Would you like to load this installed plugin into ATAK? SOOTHSAYER".

Third-Party Signing

The tak.gov documentation has a bug at the time of writing which assumes the public have access to the maven repo. This command in particular does not work, don't worry about it:

./gradlew -Ptakrepo.force=true -Ptakrepo.url=https://artifacts.tak.gov/artifactory/maven ....

When you zip the code and upload it, expect to fail the first few times. Review the debug.log in the TPP page at tak.gov to find out why and if you can't get the solution, search for it in the TAK Community discord as it's been asked before!