[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so we are jumping back into atac once again today and we're going to show you how to use an image overlay to get the internal map of a building so let's jump over to google maps for just a second and i'll show you what i'm talking about alright so here we are in google maps and this is inside one of my favorite locations of all time on the planet this is the smithsonian national air and space museum i picked this one because this is a nice good public place to go visit and it's pretty easy to see on the google maps so if i go over here to google maps you can see it's right here very public and if you go street view down here you can actually look on the inside of the smithsonian and walk around the museum and tour it virtually which is pretty neat but for our functions today we're going to use this museum and the the layout as sort of a proxy to show you a feature of atac so if you ever go to a place like this one of the very first things that i do is look for the fire escape exit or a map of the building now of course the smithsonian being a museum has maps that you can get from the visitor center down below but let's just assume today that you know we've never been here before and we're walking around and lo and behold we can go around here and check and see there is a map right there so there is a map right there on the wall and look at that that's pretty neat isn't it so what we can do is zoom in and we can see all of the different exhibits and since the smithsonian has a very unique building construction this allows us to illustrate this in atac a little easier so what i can do is make sure that i'm sort of centered on it very nicely right here and i can go down to my handy dandy snipping tool and i can snip this map right here now of course i've got my icon right there in the middle of that map but you know right here so this is not an ideal version but when i import it into atac i'll show you the one that i took earlier where i actually took some time to center it what you're going to want to do is if you go into a building and you see a map on the wall take a picture of it but make sure to take it as straight on with a 90 degree angle as possible it makes this a whole lot easier once we jump into atac so i'll go ahead and save this and we'll jump over to atac and i'll show you how this all works alright so here we are in atac and i have found the smithsonian building on the map so this uh once again i downloaded imagery ahead of time so that you can see the building now as you can see this image is not a nadir image a nader image and a dir nader imagery is taken directly straight down uh at a 90 degree angle and as most people know uh nader imagery is kind of hard to find a lot of times so as you can see here the building is kind of off off kilter a little bit this is the side of the building whereas on this side you can't see the side of a building so it's not a perfectly straight down shot but it will work for our purposes so what we're going to use is called is a tool called rubber sheets now if you're familiar with the atac app you will easily find rubber sheets as per as part of the menu dropdowns however on windtack it's actually hidden it's a hidden feature of wintec so it's kind of hard to find so let me show you where it's at you go to overlays and let that load for just a second once again my computer is kind of slow when running the screen capture software but here we are in in imagery overlays so what we're going to do is go to over here on overlay manager click imagery overlays as you can see i've got a couple of random ones here loaded already but what we're going to want to do is click this little edit icon and really this is the disguised button it doesn't necessarily let you edit it allows you to create kmz's from an image which is exactly what we want so we're going to click this button right here and as you can see i have the the import manager over here so what i'm going to do now is get rid of this overlay manager just so i can have a little bit more screen space and what i'm going to do is zoom out just a tad because i've already done this just to show you i'll zoom out just a tad on my image here and i'm going to go import this image so click the file and then i will load where it is stored in this case it's right here i actually did this try this a couple of times so we're going to load in the second attempt a little bit better of an image and you can see it's quite a large image so this drops it right on the map so what we're going to do is we're going to have to monkey around with a little bit you can drag the corners in here to reshape and resize it so i'm going to shrink it quiet down a little bit see here or my smithsonian at right there let's bring this corner in as well now we can zoom in so as you can see when that image came in it is it is very very opaque you can't see through it so i'm going to reduce that just a little bit so that i can sort of line this up and as you can tell let me bouncing this back and forth in every imagery analyst favorite thing to do balance things back and forth like this you can see that these four little alcoves here are actually on the other side so i have to flip this image around rotate it by grabbing this right here and now it's starting to look a lot a lot more familiar right so let's zoom in a little bit and let's grab and see if i can match this corner to this corner of this building here let's do this we have to do this quite a few times so don't worry we're going to match up these corners you see how it's starting to take shape all right bring this one in as well and let's bring in this final one right here and let's double check make sure our corners haven't moved this one moves slightly i'm going to bring that back in just a tad and as you can see the the uh the imagery that we have does not uh it's not straight up and down it's not nader so this is this is why your your mapping is going to be slightly off so like right here i don't know if you can see this on your end but uh there's just a slight discrepancy of maybe just a couple of feet maybe a meter or so right there and also right there as well and you can see it kind of the wall is a little bit off but for you know just walking around a museum this is pretty good so let me bounce back and forth just again just to make sure that we're we're looking at the right thing here and of course if you load this into powerpoint you can crop out a lot of this gray area so that you just have the interior of the building or you can use another cropping tool whatever so i'm going to do this now what this does this tool within wintec this will create a kmz or really a kml of this image and georeference it so that you can load it into whatever else you want and in this case we're going to load it right back into wintec so what we're going to do is go over here to the bottom right and click export kmz i'm going to export it and we're going to save it wherever we're going to save it i already have this saved so i'm going to click cancel and i'm going to exit this out and boom it's going to disappear so this is kind of where you know once again as i mentioned before wintec is not exactly the the best variant of atac but it's a little handier for doing fine detailed work like this so in this case we're going to import that kmz that we just exported it doesn't keep it in wintec it just creates the km kmz or kml so we're going to go to our import manager this time and we're going to import a file and we're going to import that kmz right there okay we're gonna click open and in this case you have two choices here you're gonna do a kmz file or imagery i prefer a kmz file so that you can change it a little bit easier but if you're doing something like say a drone footage or you have like you know some weather balloon imagery that you get or something like that you're going to click imagery and that will import it as an image files but we're going to keep it as a kmz for now so go ahead and bring that in as you can see there it is now let's get rid of this import manager now you might be thinking hey this isn't clear it's not oh it's very opaque you can't see through it so you're going to go to your overlays and this is why having it as a kmz was was important because you can go in here and click image overlays again and there it is you can now click this button right here and change how clear it is so you can go with totally transparent so you can't see it or you can go with a little bit i i like a little a measure right there it's good for me and then that way that'll let me know i can still read this on my phone and then i can uh do whatever i need to do this is very handy you can make it if you have this is very handy if you have several of these stacked on top of each other because obviously the smithsonian is more than just one floor this is just the second floor map so you can have several of these floors in here and you can make all of them clear but one and then if you chant once you change floors you go up a floor you turn that floor off and then turn the other floor on using this sliding tool right here very handy very awesome to have and it could be very very handy so let's do this one more time and let's do this with a more something a little bit more common because let's face it a lot of the places you're going to be going to and most places most people go to don't have very handy maps they're not museums right so what about something like a hotel so let's jump into that right quick all right so here i am on tripadvisor and i just randomly searched for a hotel and i was able to find this particular one and as you'll see on a lot of these travel websites what people will do is take a picture of the emergency evacuation plan for the hotel and show you what what the floor plan is which is very very handy for us so if you were going to this hotel i would advise you know taking a picture or or any hotel take a picture of this and then you can do this in atac so what i went ahead and did was i took a screenshot of this i dropped it in powerpoint and cropped out really the everything except for just this little bit and we can upload it in atac once again so let's jump over to that so here we are again in atac and here is the best western cotton tree in this is the particular hotel i just looked up the address converted that to a uh a gps coordinate and created a point just to so i can navigate there a little easier in wintec so let's go ahead and open up our overlays and let's create that overlay right quick go to image overlays this little pencil here that hides the create kmz from image button let's select our file in this case it's this one right here that i've already cropped and let's get rid of this so that we can see what's going on here as you can see it imports it quite large so let's let's size this down a little bit and see if we can keep it kinda square because this image on um on tripadvisor was was quite uh quite a straight on image which is exactly what we're looking for whenever you're trying to take a picture of a map always take a picture of the map as as uh square on as you can alright so this one again is rotated so you can see that right there and let me go ahead and reduce the opacity over here opacity however you say that and let's start matching up corners so this one's a little easier because this image for this hotel was taken very much uh it's it's not nader because if it was nader these these telephone poles here would just be dots um it's going to be almost impossible to find a nader image but for most you know all intents and purposes most imagery you're going to find in the civilian world is going to be close close enough right so let's go ahead and start matching these corners up you can see they had a lot of new construction here or what's more likely is this fire map isn't all that accurate so this is one of the things that you're running into is that a lot of fire maps they are too scale they are to scale but they're not perfectly to scale and you'll find that out once you start uh doing this a little bit more often as you can see here there's probably a little bit of construction that corner is definitely the same because that match that matches up right there and that matches up so this was brought in a little bit and this is actually more like what it's like as you can see i'm trying to match up the corners here trying to get it as square on as i can this looks like it's the most accurate way to do it because we want the width to stay the same let's see here yeah this is about as close as we're going to get to an actual thing here and you can see it it opens up quite quite nicely is because you can see right here if i were to turn this overlay off you could see a door a little doorway right there which is probably way for people to get into the hotel and as you can see that lines up perfectly with the stairwell so as you can see this is a very very valuable tool for you to have and know how to do with an atac especially if you're in a hotel or traveling or or going in a building where you might not be familiar with the floor plan atac can very much help you out and if you have other people in the building as well well that just makes it all the better and you know you can't necessarily rely on google maps or something like that which are you know derivative of gps you know on wintec and atac you can choose your put your spot manually so you look on the map see what room you're outside of put your puck on the map there and that's where you are and you can figure out how to get out that way should you need to so yeah this is a very handy intelligence collection tool it's very handy for planning operations and things like that even if something as simple as traveling around or going to a museum or going to a building or something like that and it's very very handy if you're if you're doing a lot of intelligence collection and you happen to see an image where somebody has been well you can look up that location and find out what the floor plan is drop it into atac and then there you go this is now you have interior maps of a place where uh it's going to be very hard to find interior maps of so hopefully this was helpful um please drop a like comment or subscribe uh to our uh to our channel here and make sure to check out our other stuff as well for more atac videos we're going to be doing a lot more of these uh soon and uh yeah once again hopefully this was helpful and as you guys always know it make sure to fight in shape you

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we're going to be taking a look at how to download better more accurate and more recent imagery satellite imagery for wintec and attack applications you can also use this imagery in google earth if you're so inclined or any other mapping software but to do this today we're going to continue sticking with our example here of the smithsonian in washington dc as you can see here i've still got the imagery overlay turned on from our last video so if you don't know how to overlay internal like building maps overlay those onto an atac or wintac map just go ahead and check out that video and that will show you how to do that but the reason that we're downloading this imagery is to make this map a little bit better so the first thing we need to do to download better imagery is actually abandon attack because we're not going to download the imagery through wintec we're going to download it from the internet so let's jump over there alright so here we are on the usgs data distribution service website for the bulk download application tool i cannot think of a more dull and boring sounding name than this particular product but this is going to be very necessary moving forward if you're going to download more than just one image so if you haven't done so already you can create an account with the usgs it's free it just requires an email they ask for some more information but they don't really check on if you fill it out correctly or not so just go ahead and create an account that's going to be very necessary to use this bulk download application tool so if you go ahead and download this make sure that you choose the the correct uh version for your system otherwise it will make you want to pull your hair out because it won't work right so uh or it'll just partially work and you won't get the full benefit so if you have a 64-bit system make sure you get the 64-bit platform all right so once you've downloaded this you can run the installer it's just an exe file it's a fairly straightforward installation process i'm just going to skip right over because it's really not worth covering but to download the imager we're going to jump over to another website called the earth explorer so let's jump over to the usgs earth explorer and this is the main website as you can see here it's just a map of the united states and it's got a lot of stuff here don't worry we're going to go through all of this in in great detail so the first thing you need to do is really understand that imagery is not a simple thing imagery is is very wide ranging it can take many different forms and there are lots and lots and lots of different kinds of imagery and many different ways to download it this is just one way that we would recommend because it's just really easy to do comparatively so with all that in mind when you're downloading imagery you need to be very very very specific what kind of imagery do you want where you want the imagery how much of it do you want from a particular area and when do you want it and there's a million other parameters that you can fill out to get imagery so let's go through that process with one single type of imagery for the area so the first thing we need to do to do that is zoom in to our particular target area this is zooming on in let's see here we are and i have zoomed in as far as my mouse will let me here on over top of the smithsonian national air space museum so once you've got this nice and centered in your field of view here we're going to go over here now ignore this top part for a second we don't really need it for right now this is for more more advanced type stuff and we're going to go down here and tell the tell the system tell the database where we want this image to be taken so what you can do is you can choose all these different kinds of tools to to pre-define an area you can choose different polygons you can do all kinds of stuff but we're just going to click use the map and that's why we centered our map on this particular building because now it just took a it just took the corners of where the display was looking and that's good enough for us we don't that's that's a nice uh that'll give us a good sample here you can also type in each corner manually but who wants to do that the next thing you're going to want to do is tell the system when when do you want this imagery taken so i have chosen the dates january 1st 2010 to 2021. now normally this would would give you a lot a lot of images but for us for this very small area it's not going to give us a lot it's just going to give us a handful to work with more than what we need but it's better to have more when you're downloading this type of stuff and also what you're going to want is to click cloud cover right here you're going to want to change this cloud cover to be zero to like 10 percent that's that's sort of the industry standard if you have less than 10 percent less than 10 cloud cover for your image it's good enough good enough for government work at least right and if you happen to be searching for a much larger area right down here this will save your life by clicking result options changing results per page to 250. if you're downloading more than say 250 images this is what i would choose but we're just going to download a few for today so once you've got your criteria you've told this database where you want images taken from you've told the system when you want them taken from and you really told them sort of what right here with the cloud cover but we really need to specify what kind of imagery so the next step is you can click data sets here or you can click it up here at the top either one will take you to the same place and this is where you're going to choose what kind of imagery you want so we're not going to cover all of these it would take us at least an hour to cover all of these different types of of imagery and their uh and their subsets here so we're just going to pick one and the one we're going to pick is going to be aerial imagery high resolution ortho imagery that's the only one we're going to want to download and that is the only one that will come up in our search here so you can leave this expanded closed whatever it doesn't work it doesn't matter and then now you now that now the search is complete right you can put in additional criteria if you know what what image number you want you could put that in there but this is just for a simple simple explanation uh once you've got that selected whatever imagery you want click results and it's going to think for just a second and there we go now this one only gave us five images five images of this particular area now we'll show you what these tools mean along the bottom here very very quickly we're gonna blaze through that because it's not super important but up here at the top what you can do is this will probably probably be like this click show result controls this will help you out a lot and just click show all footprints from current page there you go that will tell you that will show you the footprints of all of these images that were taken since there are five i'm guessing that each of these squares was imaged twice and this was imaged once that's just my guess from doing this quite a bit but you can go ahead and leave that turned on or leave it turned off i'm going to turn it off for now to show you what each of these little markers along each individual image means and here in your search results these are actual this is every image that was taken by the satellite the raw image right so the first one shows you the footprint clicking that will tell you the footprint of the image it will tell you where it was taken on the earth and if you wanted to get rid of that for a second you could go to the next one which will show you the actual image so this is the actual image it will allow you to browse and then zoom in it's not going to be terribly high quality at this stage it trust me if i were to download this image it will be very it will be a lot more high quality later but just during here in the browse function it's not really that high quality and then these next these next two icons aren't super important this one will show you it will allow you to compare a couple of images that overlap this next one here will allow you to see the metadata from it which is important if you're trying to do some math using this imagery which we will show in a later video some of the math you might want to use when looking at this imagery and then these next three are are kind of useful so the first one here this one with the little green arrow pointing down that will allow you to download just this one image if you if this is the only image you want you can click here and download that this will allow you to not use that weird data download tool that you had to install your computer like i mentioned in the beginning if you just need one image that's all you need right there but usually you're going to be downloading a lot so that's where you're going to need to click this which will allow you to add it to your bulk download and as you can see that turned it green now the bulk down the bulk download tool which is linked to my account shows that it will help you download this all at once and this last one will help you delete this particular image from your search results so remember how i said that if you've got a couple hundred of these images uh changing the search results so 250 would help you well that's because up here at the top you can add all results from current page to bulk download and that's exactly what we want as you can see you turn them all green this is very handy because once you start getting into the hang of doing this imagery thing you're going to be downloading hundreds of these images so there we go that is how you're going to download the image and once you've got these all selected we're going to view item basket now like i said this is kind of an rkx system but it once you click that button it will bring you to this page and it'll see right here it says bulk download five scenes uh what you're going to need to do is see it'll even tell you that you need the bulk download application uh and then click start order now here's the frustrating part for a lot of people that get stuck on this step so i'm going to show you you can select bulk download i'm going to put right here smithsonian yep spelled that right for once so you can try to click this button right here all day long it's not going to click for you being a government website you have to expand this list and this will show you the name the numbers the serial numbers of all of the images you're trying to download once you can see them on your screen like this now this button turns into a dark blue and you can actually download it so now as you can see it says order smithsonian has been submitted and it will give you an email address for uh for for the account that you used to sign up with your your account here so now we're done now we're done with the the the internet part now we need to jump over to that bulk uh data tool so when you first start the bulk download application it's going to ask you for your username and login this is to sync this particular program with your online account all right so once you're in the very first thing you're going you're going to want to do before doing anything else is make sure that you have your installation directory set correctly this is super important because you don't want to end up filling up the wrong hard drive with terabytes and terabytes of imagery so you to to do that you go click settings and click destination directory settings if you click that it will allow you to choose the directory that you can download this imagery to so once you give it a few minutes once again it's a government server so it takes it a few minutes to to sort of recognize what's going on and that hey there's some imagery i need to download once you've given it a couple of minutes go up here to file and open order that is if it isn't already opened if you open this bulk download application tool usually this this form here will open up automatically but in just in case it doesn't that's how you get to it also i have found that the bulk download application needs to be started in administrator mode so if you are don't have a minister of access to your computer or it's acting really weird re close it out and restart it again in administrator mode and it will uh it'll it'll work just fine for you so as you can see right here that right there is my one image one uh sort of order that's what they call it a bulk download order that i made from the internet and now this compute this application is talking to the server and now it's trying to download these images so to to start that download make sure that this is the right one you want click select order and it will load all of the images up here in their serial numbers for uh for for download now here along the bottom of the screen i feel like i should mention the uh the size of this kind of thing so a lot of times you're not going to know how big this file is going to be until you click the download until you've made the order right so let's say that my my hard drive is filling up here and i need to figure out um if this order is going to be too large or not you can look down here at the bottom of the screen as you can see i have this hooked up to it to a external hard drive and the hard drive itself has 315.8 gigabytes of space and as you can see right here this this this box along the very very bottom of the screen is labeled as remaining size 286.84 megabytes now that does not mean that the the space on your drive it means how much of this imagery still has remaining to download right and it'll tell you the speed right here so you can see that that all of that adds up to 286.4 so these are all the images that are waiting to be downloaded and you can to start the download of course you can go over here and click begin download and it'll start it will do three at a time and um once one of them is done it it will uh it'll it'll go to the next one as you can see this is going to take quite a while especially for downloading hundreds of images but the reason that you want to do the bulk download applications two reasons one if you're downloading more than one image it's handy and two you can let it run all night long like while you're sleeping or not using your computer which is what we end up doing here a lot of times we'll just let the image download download you know terabytes and terabytes of imagery whatever you need and it'll be there when whenever you come back to it also this bulk download application tool will restart a download if some image gets corrupted because it's coming from a government server and because of a bunch of other technical stuff is kind of hard to understand sometimes these images get corrupted when they're being downloaded so this application will double check to make sure that they're accurate and they're okay and if they're not occasionally don't worry if you see one this is one there's there's like one or two errors don't worry about that when it gets to the end of the download it will retry those files and then retry them until it can download them successfully so that's a very handy tool it's just fire and forget come back to it when it's done so we're gonna gonna let this download and we will come back to it once it is done all right so here we are we are back the the bulk download application gave us this nice little notification let us know that downloads are complete we're going to click ok and now we can exit the application we don't need to keep any of this stuff around all right so our download is complete we're all shut down on the downloading that's all done now we're back in atac so what we need to do from here is go to our handy dandy import manager click import files and navigate to the place that you saved this particular imagery and this is what the files are going to look like they're going to be in a zip file no need to extract them or anything atec is really good about importing files so don't worry about it just select all of the ones that you need and it will bring them in then you click open and it will start loading them in now i've already loaded these in and it took forever because i downloaded the entirety of washington dc uh when i did this first time so that took quite a bit of time that's why there's a lot of these lines and things overlaying so once you import these it's going to take a little bit of time now once they're imported you've got to turn them on so from there you go to your maps and favorites right it's not the overlays you'd think it'd be an overlay but it isn't it's going to import this imagery as imagery because the imagery is what's called a geotiff file this is a file that is is that is a geo-referenced imagery file so a tag is going to recognize it and it's going to know exactly where to put it and that place is in favorites and maps all right so here in maps and favorites this is the menu you're going to see now these are all of the image sources that you're going to be able to pick from normally in attack or wintac and it will stream these online that's where that's why you can zoom to any part of the country and this will auto populate see how it's auto updating well it's because i'm online well with the image resource right here you're not going to be using this particular tab so you can either turn it off turn it off or leave it online i like to leave it off as you can see here i've already got a couple of couple of areas saved in my in my cache here but what we're really going to do is click the imagery tab now once you click the imagery tab you've got a few different options here i'm going to turn that off for now it's just a random kmz you're going to get the normal blurry background image that atack is known for right but once you start zooming in then you're going to have some options here so let me zoom right on into the smithsonian as you can see there's my image overlay that helps me know where it's at now i've got a couple of choices here i can choose geotiff 30 centimeter or gift of 20 centimeter remember how when i was downloading these images they look like they kind of overlapped well they did in this particular area so let me choose 30 centimeter here let's see what we got i zoom on in i might have to padlock it to get it to turn on and there we go that's exactly what i had to do turning the padlock on will force this image to display even if there are other options so so just like that so that's how you can get that to work and now let's go ahead and choose something better something with a smaller resolution right 20 centimeter imagery let's choose the padlock that instead look at that it's it's a lot better imagery this is very very good imagery for what it is and as you can see here from from the same uh from that tutorial earlier how i showed you how to overlay this map this map is now off well that's because now you're using more accurate imagery and as you can see this particular image is is very close to nader you can actually see that it is it is with way less than one degree off from nader because this uh this light pole here you can see the shadow but the actual pole is a dot so this image was taken almost straight down at the ground i can if i uploaded the metadata i could tell you exactly what it was but um yeah this is how you can update your maps as say you're trying to to throw an overlay on a map that isn't on the map because it's a new construction well this is how you do it and that's pretty neat because then you can start using these other things as well and if your area isn't like a sensitive area like washington dc is like over here across the river we actually have 10 centimeter 10 centimeter imagery over here across the river um here in these green squares let me turn these these images off and let's just use the 10 centimeter imagery let's see here padlock that one man that is that is some really nice imagery 10 centimeter is about as small as you can go in the civilian world and as you can see that's pretty good not quite will smith enemy of the state good but if i switch by using these lines on the road here as reference actually let me see if i can find a building a building for reference yeah here we go so check it out this is a building with a little parking area and i'm going to go to 20 centimeter imagery see a little little worse not not too bad though you can still make out cars and stuff and then 30 centimeter imagery you can see a lot more a lot more blurry 30 centimeter is usually what google earth is going to be giving you but you can go all the way down to 10 right here as you can see that's pretty pretty good so yeah that's how you upload better imagery for google earth it takes some time obviously it takes a lot of resources i'm going to be using up a lot of resources um i'm downloading this better imagery because you can see now i can go into this overlay and now match these corners up like i did when i first drop this overlay in and then this this image will be a lot a lot more accurate and then you can export that image and then that that's your map right there so hopefully this was helpful for everyone uh sorry if it took a little bit longer than normal it's just trying to explain all this stuff will help help help you understand how the whole process works so please leave us a like comment and subscribe below and make sure to check out our other content we've got a lot more of these atac videos coming out and we've got our of course our normal s2 underground content as well so thanks for watching and we will see you next time and always remember to fight in the shade you

[Music] so hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we're going to walk you through a quick installation of atac and all the stuff you need to get it running so the first thing you need to get attack running is obviously an android smartphone which i have here any smartphone will work it doesn't really matter on which one but you might find that if you buy like a cheaper burner android phone that the versions that are on the google play store might not be compatible with your version but don't worry they usually are anyway like in this case this particular phone that i'm using today is just an old burner phone that i had lying around and it uh the version of atac that's on the app store is not even compatible with this but it does work next thing you need is obviously the apk like i mentioned you can get the app from the google play store but there's a couple of reasons you might not want to do that for one you might not want google to know that you're downloading the app and even if you're using a burner google account it's just one more thing that you have to deal with and there's always the potential for automatic updates even if you turn automatic updates off there's still that potential right it's still linked to the cloud in some way whereas if you download the raw apk file once you install it no one will ever know that you have it which is what we're going to do today the third thing you need is imagery and or in this case i have an imagery file now this is just an xml file that will allow us to stream imagery from the esri clarity database of imagery if you want to know how to download specific imagery tiles we already have a video on how to do that but but for today we're just going to stream imagery from the internet the next thing you need is elevation data this goes hand in hand with the imagery it's just another file that you drop in but once you've got it loaded in it's very useful to have in fact it's crucial to have for things like view shed being able to use the 3d functions of atac and navigation and things like that you're going to need elevation data and the fifth thing you're going to need are plugins and i've just got a couple of plugins here just as a sample just so that you can see how they're installed and all that the plugins as everyone knows plugins are always a hard thing to come by when it comes to atac for the civilian sector now if you're if you're a government or you have a dot mil or gov email address you can of course get all the plugins you want and use them on your private system but the sort of culture for atac and the civilian sector is um is not super great right now so uh and support is kind of lacking but we can talk about that another day but for now we're just going to run you through the installation so so what i've done here is i've just i'm just viewing all the files that i've downloaded to my downloads folder in this android installation now i've got all the files here that i need it's going to be pretty easy all i'm going to do is just tap the atac app and install the application now you might have to on your particular device you might have to check uh install apps from unknown sources or something like that but for this case this phone's already good to go so we're just gonna install the application and once it's installed all we gotta do is open it that's all we need to do so next up we're going to go through the installation process on the atac all you need to do is accept a bunch of stuff so of course end user license agreement i would advise reading it but whatever i've already read it so now here's the the kind of kicker that a lot of people get a little bit out of shape about and that is the permissions that atec requires so a lot of people who haven't used atac and don't really understand what it what it is are a little bit apprehensive about taking a government app an app that was developed for the united states military and putting it on their device and then giving it a bunch of permissions when you phrase it like that it sounds like atec is just a spy satellite in your pocket but here's the thing it's it's not of course you know don't take our word for it don't trust us on any of this stuff do your own our research and looking into this kind of stuff and you know look out the third party reviews and all that kind of stuff and check out the source code and stuff like that if you want but just keep in mind that the data on atac doesn't go anywhere it's not like it's reporting back to a home server on the government's website you know or anything like that it can if you want it to and when you do that you obviously have to set up the server from the government side there's no like master server for atac anywhere in the military it's just even tack maps has different servers within it so that's something to keep in mind is that like look yes it's going to request your location data but it's because that's because it's a gps app well you know it's like if you're going to want to use a gps geospatial you know team awareness kit you're going to have to enable gps right so um that's just something i'll sort of explain what all these things do but right here in the beginning it says this data is not sent to the developer's application so and that's most certainly true so so yeah the first one is device location yep you're going to want to allow this all the time or you can deny it either way it's up to you i leave it on all the time because i want attack i want my other team members to know where i'm at when i'm using the atac app when it's running on this particular device i want them to know it and of course you can disable that within the app itself i'll show you how to do that here in a second phone calls that's for a specific plugin take pictures and video well you can within the atac app you can actually take pictures and georeference them and things like that so that's cool so i'm going to allow that same thing with files so that you can save data right and record audio this particular notification or permission is for a specific plugin that will allow you to record radio traffic so i'm going to record that or allow that and here we go all right so once the atac app is running it's going to give you this particular device set up now you can go ahead and change all this stuff now and start importing all your data it's set up for to to pop up this little screen on your first install but let's just say for a second that you don't have this or it doesn't pop up or you accidentally click done that's okay let me go ahead and get rid of this battery optimization stuff so if you didn't want to use that little pop-up menu that you get right when you when you install atack you can always uh go over here to the import manager so you're going to click the top three dots at the top right hand corner find the little tab says import manager and here we go so once you click the sd card little icon you can navigate to the folder where you have this stuff saved and this is the file that i'm going to load this esri clarity world imagery.xml and click ok and it's going to start bringing it in now as you can see it changed the sort of map here but that's because i haven't i brought it in but i didn't turn it on so what i need to do is go to maps and favorites this little map icon up here of course when you start atec you're gonna get all this tutorial stuff fine whatever and as you can see right here at the very top is gonna be the esri clarity world imagery so let me do that again for you you're going to click the maps and favorites icon up here at the top and esri clarity world imagery that's the file that i just downloaded and as you can see it's already got 248 kilobytes of cache and if i zoom in let's say zoom into india here it will start clearing up that's because it's streaming from the internet i've got this connected to wi-fi and it will continue to download and uh get this high-resolution imagery uh for you there it's good to play around with i personally don't tend to use this a lot because i almost never use my atac app on the internet i always use downloaded imagery but there you go so once again maps and favorites and you can choose which one you can also choose the outline of if you wanted to cache it for offline use but we'll show you how to do that later but for now let's bring in the elevation data so let's go back to our handy dandy import manager click local sd card here we are in our file again and bring in the detailed information there we go it's going to bring in for just a second it's going to take a minute to load okay here we go and as you can see like i mentioned the atac app has a very simple import manager it's it detected that this file is a dted file so it's going to so we're going to import it as a zipped dted directory this because that's exactly what it is okay once we bring it in just give it a second to think a minute and you should be able to zoom in to like zoom into the himalayas here for a second all right so to make sure you've got the dted stuff installed and it's all running and all that you can hold down the north arrow no sorry i missed it hold down the north arrow turn on 3d as you can see now your map is displaying 3d mountains which is pretty cool so let me go ahead and allow you to see that you can built it panel that kind of stuff you can see there's definitely a 3d effect to the map there's other ways to check if you've got a detailed available but i just find that's a pretty handy way to do it so uh yeah there we go now if we wanted to bring in plugins we're going to do the same exact thing so we're going to go to the import manager local sd card right here let's just say let's bring in the hammer apk the hammer is an app which will allow you to use attack with a normal civilian off the shelf radio so as you can see i've already got it in here so i'm just going to click overwrite and as you can see atec is not allowed to install apps running sources i'm going to go into settings right quick allow from this source jump back and install there we go now it's all done now once you've installed the apk you can outside the app just tap the apk if you wanted to but now it's going to want to load the plug-in into all right guys so that's how you install plug-ins uh sorry i didn't show the exact end of that plug-in loading i had to shut it actually down because the hammer plug-in conflicted with the microphone on my uh on my screen recording app here so sorry about that but in order to show you how to check to see that the hammer plug-in or any other plug-in is loaded you go to your settings go to your full settings go to tac package management and it will be right here it'll be listed on this page now i had to uninstall it so that i could finish this particular tutorial but just want to show you that's that's how that works so yeah that's pretty much it now you should be up and running to go with atac and you can start doing all kinds of different stuff like dropping points and all kinds of stuff so i just wanted to show you how to briefly get atec up and going and of course we will have many many more a-tech tutorials on how to do specific things within atax so that's really a brief introduction of how to get atac started on your device if you found this helpful please like comment and subscribe and make sure to follow us on other platforms as well just in case youtube ends up shutting us down for some reason and if you'd like to support us monetary early make sure to check out our merch store or our patreon so that we can continue bringing videos and tutorials and other content to you guys uh in the future so that's all we've got for now and we will see you next time and always remember to fight in the shade you

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we're going to be taking a look at atac or more specifically wintac and how you can use it to plan missions so as you can probably guess atac is a very useful platform and it can do a lot of things in fact it can do so many things that people have a hard time trying to contextualize and sort of understand exactly what atac can do so today we're going to be running through a fictitious scenario and showing how atac can be a valuable mission asset in the civilian world as well so we're really not going to go over any one particular feature today we're just going to be playing around and messing around with wintec and showing you some of the different things that it can do attacking or wintec in this case is not perfect in fact atac the whole tack family of products wintac is is by far the the most undesirable in the atac community because it has a lot of issues and it's not really a priority for development it's not quite as as gucci as the atac apps however we find that using wintac for mission planning is pretty useful considering that you have the power of a pc computer and you can use a mouse and other things as well you can it's not it's easier to do things on a laptop than on a phone so let's uh let's go through our fictitious mission scenario all right so exercise exercise exercise all that jazz mission scenario you have received reporting through local information sources that unknown aircraft have been staging at your local airport intelligence reported through your human networks indicates that the aircraft are staging at the airport with more aircraft arriving periodically your mission is to establish a covert observation post from which a rotating team can observe aircraft landing at the airport once the covert observation post is complete your task is to conduct visual reconnaissance of the airport as well as any aircraft landing or taking off you are required to log every aircraft that may be on the ground and where they are parked reporting back sitreps every hour you are responsible for your own support there will be no chance of aerial resupply and ground-based resupply will not be guaranteed as a result you are responsible for all mission planning and have nearly unlimited leeway for how you complete this mission so yeah in the civilian world this might be all of the information that you get no formal pirs no eeis your entire intelligence collection mission might result from a five minute phone call or a text message exchange and it's your job to organize plan and carry out the mission you do not have a battle staff to help you you will usually be on your own so for all of the real military and government analysts out there please keep this in mind as we're going through this we're looking at this through the lens of the civilian world and as such we do have a few assumed factors for this exercise to make it a little bit more easy in the training environment for one the weather we will assume a broken cloud ceiling at 15 000 feet msl above mean sea level that will move into a full overcast ceiling by the time we sp or hit the start point precipitation is not expected during the duration of this mission the elevation of the airport is right at around 5700 feet so that means that as we're standing on the ground we're going to have about 9 300 feet of clear air space over our heads this is good for evading detection for unmanned aerial systems that won't be able to fly down below the cloud ceiling so really we're just looking at terrain masking from terrestrial collection efforts if there are any and as far as electronic surveillance we're going to assume that cell phone stingrays will be operational in nearby city and that aircraft landing in the airport might have like gilgamesh boxes or dirt boxes on board as well and on the counter surveillance front we're going to assume that limited counter surveillance efforts will be conducted but they will be limited to the immediate perimeter of the airport so that's pretty much it just a quick and dirty hey let's go figure out what's going on over there type mission all right so here we are in wintec so also just for simplicity's sake and to avoid a lot of the frustration that comes with a an online imagery source i have go i've went ahead and downloaded to my computer imagery for this area so in this green box here it's already pre-loaded so we're going to first the first thing we're going to do is load in our sort of target right we're not actually connecting targeting here but we need somewhere to to uh to go off so we're going to go up here to the top left click import manager and import files because lucky enough our source gave us a kmz so as you see i already have a few here but i'm going to click this one and that's going to be it it's going to take a minute to load okay thank you import manager so let's go over here to our overlays see it kind of glitched out for a second all right here we go let's see file overlays we've got kml loaded in there and as you can see we have our target airport kmz and that's it there's only one point in there see this is what happens when you're in the sort of civilian world you're not going to get a full pir list and it's not going to be specific you might just get a grid and that's it so uh just as a side note i've got another one loaded in here just from messing around a little bit but so if you wanted to delete another one just to make things more simple you go up here select it and delete and that'll delete it so now really we've only got this 1kml file is one target right there and that zooms it to it so uh when i'm looking at this airport i'm looking at it looks like a fairly civilian style airport right nothing super duper special about it i did choose this location randomly this airport has really no major significance i only picked it because uh it has a lot of good terrain nearby so that we could use our 3d functionality in wintec pretty well so i just picked it because it it will allow us to check that out a little easier all right so the first thing i want to do is figure out where i'm going to put my lpop and as you remember one of the very few requirements of this mission is to be able to see the runway be able to see the parking zones uh see aircraft on the tarmac and be able to identify them so we need to be close enough to figure that out but we also need to be close enough or further far enough away to where we're going to avoid that counter surveillance and avoid that stingray electronic surveillance down here to the southeast and they said in the urban area so what we're going to do is i'm just just looking at this i can look and say all right cool it looks like there's a mountain range here this is more of a valley floor here i'm going to guess that my recon site is going to be up in this area somewhere this is just me looking down at it on the map but let's be absolutely sure so what we're going to do to figure out what you can see [Music] from the ground we're going to do what's called a view shed now a lot of people tend to sort of explain the view shed a little bit wonky but it's actually quite simple so let me go ahead and zoom in here to what i want to be able to see from far away and let's go ahead and zoom in here today to the aircraft parking area so what i'm going to want to do is go to elevation tools let that load for just a second now on your computer of course this will be much faster the only reason that it slows because i'm not using a terribly good computer for this and the screen recording software takes a lot of a lot of cpu power so once we've got elevation tools opened up here we have three menus at the top we're going to click view shed and what we're going to do is uh set our height above marker at five feet we're just going to leave that there i'll explain what that means in a minute just remember that it is set at five feet now we're going to set our radius to be something quite big in this case 15 kilometers and we're going to keep the intensity at right around 40 or so we'll show you what that means in a minute but basically the 40 is just to make sure that you can still see the ground you can do 100 then you won't be able to see anything but um next we're going to select the marker so we're going to click this button right here as you can see right here on the map you see tap a marker or location on the map pretty simple we're just going to click on the map so this is a view shed i'm going to go ahead and exit out for just a second i'll show you what this means and the way view sheds work is if you are a five foot person or in this case a five foot target uh standing at this little eyeball symbol you can see everything in green there's clear line of sight to everything in the green everything in red you can't see so as if we go ahead and and tilt the map a little bit you can see that obviously the low-lying areas are in red because you're probably obscured by things like buildings and other terrain features but if you look upwards towards the more higher terrain you can see obviously this mountain here you can you'll be able to see and then over here you won't uh you won't be able to see that from the ground because you come up over this ridge so this is very handy this allows you to more easily select and figure out a good site to go from so this is of course one of many tools and the reason that i set this at 15k you know obviously it's obviously not ideal to be able to surveil a target from you know 10 miles away or so but this just shows the function so let me go ahead and pick a good spot and we'll come back to this in just a second all right so i've got a good spot picked out and what i'm going to do is turn off the view shed for just a second so i'm going to open up my elevation tools again go over here and click remove view shed and we will come back to that in just a second and let me turn on the point that i found by going to overlays let that load for just a second yeah it's really slow here let's go to spot spot marker there we go and that's the place i found so this is just you know of course a good training exercise right so as you can see it's here let me go ahead and tilt the map for you a little bit if it doesn't want to freeze up on me there we go so you see it's right here up on this hill um it's got not a whole lot of cover there um but we'll we're not really so much concerned about that right now are we so um yeah this is a decently good spot it's right up there on the ridge line honestly i would probably move it down so that you could move it down to like the military crest here so you're not silhouetted against the ridgeline there but whatever this works for training exercises so what i'm going to do is tilt this back north and we're going to do another view just to make absolutely certain that this spot can see the target and it gives us some ideas of what this place can see so let's go over to view shed we'll do it 15k again five feet above marker so a five foot person standing at this point right here i'm gonna do it a little bit down the hill a little ways and let's go ahead select the marker and click right there that should give us on this side of the ridge and yeah that's a pretty good once i zoom out here that's a pretty good view shed so as you can see if i'm if i'm a five foot person or sitting in a five foot above the ground level position at that little eyeball i can see the entirety of the target this position is not too bad it gives me good command of the a good portion of the valley a good portion of the city down here as well but then it also is right there on that ridge line right there on that edge of being able to pop back over pop back into the red and not be have direct line of sight to the target which is always a good thing just in case right so this looks like a pretty good site now of course we could do a lot of other videos selecting this sort of thing but this is really just to show the the uh the features of atac so let's say that this is the site i want so let me go ahead and turn off or actually let me leave the view shed on i was going to turn it off but let me let me go ahead and put some contour lines on the map here in the elevation tools as well let me show the lines i'm going to leave them as this sort of orangish color let me let me make them yellow actually so you can see them a little better so yeah this does confirm to me that yup i'm right there on that nice ridge line it looks like it does get a little steeper over here and it's a nice sloping downhill area and then there's another valley over here looks like a looks like a box canyon or something going up this way yeah there's a lot of different a lot of different stuff going on here so i'm going to go ahead and turn those contour lines back off and i'm going to go to my view shed and turn my view shed off i'm going to turn the heat map on just to just play around a little bit show you what the heat map is this shows you the high spots are red low spots are blue as you can see that shows you how that works not as not as ideal and obviously the more you zoom in the more detail you're gonna get but it's heat maps are not really a good thing unless you're building a product or product or something like that all right so let's turn that heat map off and let's let's get out of this and let's say that we need to get to this site obviously right we need to get there somehow so i'm going to start looking around and let's say that i am going to find a good spot to park let's see here i found one earlier when i was just messing around i think this one's it yeah so this is a good looks like a good two-track road but just in case we want to verify that that road is wide enough for a vehicle to get down let's go ahead and go to the range and bearing up here at the top left and then we can click measure and then we can click and drag to measure there we go and then once we sorry hang on things hang up just a second we could tell a lot of stuff about it we could open up the metadata over here once it loads and it will tell us that that is 13 feet across or 4 meters or 0.00 nautical miles right and which what bearing it's along as well and mills as well if you need that sort of thing so that's that's kind of handy to have so this tells us that road is in fact 13 feet across and that is more than enough for us so let's go ahead let's go ahead and cancel that and we will delete that as well all right so we're going to let's say that we want to park right here um just me looking at this map just from not really being familiar to all this area it looks like a pretty well used especially well used for considering how remote this area is and the elevation profile this area is insane but it looks like there's a nice little maybe a little stream dry riverbed right there so let's go ahead and say we're going to park right here so what we're going to do is i know i skipped right over dropping a point so i'll show you how to drop a point right now using the point dropper let that load for just a second all right so over here on the point dropper this is the kind of cool part you have a lot of different icons and stuff that you can use so we're just going to use the spot map for a while these are just different colored dots all right different colored dots that you can put on the map we're going to use green for now so let's say that i want to use this road for infill and then break off and hide a vehicle or something let's say let's try right about there all right so let's go ahead that comes across as g1 it automatically named labels it green one right so let's go ahead and change that name to vdo vehicle dismount operations this is where we're going to park our vehicle and get out and start walking alright so if we want to do that what we can do is we can use attack to figure out the best way to get up there so let's say that you can see this is kind of a good distance away here let's see how far it is via as the crow flies all right looks like 3 750 feet right so let's put that in kilometers yep so a little over a k right so that's as the crow flies and as you can see that is going to be a very if we were to walk straight there that's going to be a pretty significant elevation change and handy for us right here on the range and bearing page at the bottom right you can click elevation profile and this is an interesting tool this is one of the more interesting things and more useful things that atac does it will tell you over a period of distance how uh how much elevation gain you're going to have so as you can see here the elevation gain or loss in this case since we we did it from the the point down to here instead of from the video up to the point it's 460 feet of elevation change so that's not insignificant especially if you're carrying like a hundred pound rook or something like that and a lot of equipment you could see along where this elevation change goes uh just by clicking and dragging like that so this shows you at what point the elevation is at and we'll cover this this tool a lot more in a separate video but let's say that i don't want to um i don't want to go along this this straight route i want to want to take my time and i want to come up come up this hill here and then take this ridge line down we're going to do this a few times so don't worry so let's go to making a route we want to have a route so that we can follow it right so let's wait for this to load click routes up here and then we're going to add a new route and we're going to make this route we'll call this route yellow and it will be a walking route it will be an infill and it will be our primary and it will be ascending right so let's start dropping points as you can see then once i clicked okay over here we now have this nifty thing up here on our toolbar and we can start making points so uh the vdo is now our point one right so let's keep going over here and then i'm going to use my keyboard here the wasd keys will allow you to move this sideways and also your arrow keys so whatever's more comfortable for you for me it's wasd because i'm right-handed using the mouse with my right hand and use you know wasd with my left so let's see here let's go ahead and follow follow up keeping some cover down right make sure that i'm not really taking too much effort into this this is going to be if i was really going to do this for real i would take a lot more time and effort using that elevation tool to sort of follow the contours up you know just like any other hiking trip really alright so we're up here at the top of this ridge say i don't want to go to the very top of the ridge i want to maintain that military crest back down here so i click and drag these points so that we're on we're out of visual range of the target and then we're going to continue down this ridge line more or less staying out of the view of the target probably should have left on the view shed down there at the target for for now but whatever all right we're going to follow this all the way down all the way down all the way down and then we pop up over the ridge line and we are there so there you go that's how you make a route in wintec or atac then we're going to click end editing and it's going to be right there so let's go ahead and zoom out and we'll look at this all right so that's our pretty that's our good route right there and it will show us what we see along the way so if you have multiple points along the way you can add in points as well but say i wanted to do another one say i wanted to to take a little bit more indirect route or i wanted an alternate route back to the vehicle in case i get compromised or something you always wanted an alternate route so let's go ahead and make a new route we're going to make this route let's see here what do you guys think let's just do blue it will be again a walking route and this will be infill and it will be secondary and okay let's go ahead and drive this one again let's let's go this way this time now usually you want to have different infills on different uh different sides of the objectives that you can come from different angles if you need be depending on which way the wind's blowing all that kind of stuff but i say we take the lower route and then we we just kind of hump it up over this hill here which is going to be a pretty good elevation change for us and there we go just for simplicity's sake we'll make it easy there we go all right so we've got two different routes for infill we could use these for xfil we could change them whatever whatever you wanted to do that's how you make routes and the cool part is is that say i was trying to choose between these two what i could do is go over here to the route details and click elevation profile and it will tell me how hard that trip will be as you can see grab our slider over here it's going to be not a whole lot of elevation gain a lot of elevation gain and then here at the end it sort of sort of goes up as we pop up over that hill so that's kind of interesting it's really helpful for planning hiking routes um a lot of other stuff as well so let's go ahead and and choose let me choose let me do the same thing with uh route yellow here do the elevation tool again and we'll see oh the elevator tool is still locked on the other one sorry hang on just a second route two we're gonna change this to route let's see route yellow just for simplicity's sake let's take that elevation route again let's see what we got here so this one it looks like you actually go downhill for a good amount of time for a little bit and you start coming up and then it's a slow steady incline this one looks like it's a lot harsher actually but then once you're up there on top of that ridge as you can see it levels out pretty good for the rest of the way so this one might be advantageous for some things depending on what you're trying to do you know if you find that you you'd like to the weather is permitting and you want to have this part of your journey right here climbing up that mountain at that point in time to be the uh strenuous part you could do that otherwise you could take the other easier route or you could go one way and then come back the other either way whatever you want to do so i'm going to change this to route blue and that will work for that just so that we can have that nice and neat for later right so we're done editing those routes and let's let's say that we want to add some phase lines here phase lines are a good way of in case you're going up there not not up there by yourself and you're reporting back your position to someone else like a headquarters element or just family back at home what you can do is add in phase lines and this is a good way to demonstrate the drawing tool so let me get we get rid of our routes over here let's go to our drawing tool right here i'm just going to click draw polyline and this is it i'm just going to say pick a good spot for a phase line let's see right here see if you remember we were going downhill until we got right here and then this right here this section from here to here was the most difficult part so i'm going to put a phase line right there for route yellow i'm going to end the shape and let's see we're going to do this and i'm going to name it let's call it phase line hmm let's go with spongebob see doesn't have to be anything super super duper special um i'm going to hesitate to name it yellow because our routes are yellow so i'm going to pick orange i know spongebob is obviously not orange but that kind of helps a little bit then i'm going to go over here and see there we've got phase line spongebob and this is so that say that you're trying to radio back and you don't have anybody tracking you like every step you take right you're actually having to expend resources to transmit your position you could say hey we just passed phase line spongebob it's a milestone in your trek so let's put one right there and let's put another one up here right as you get to the ridge because if anything's going to happen it's when you get to the very top of this elevation and you might have some kind of adversarial force on the other side something might happen if there's anything going to happen it's going to be right here at this point so let's go ahead and draw another polyline let's put it like right about here in that shape and we'll call this one once it loads call this one baseline patrick we'll make it magenta there we go and close that out and then let's put one more in there because if you remember this is not along the very top of the ridge line because as we remember we don't want to silhouette ourselves we want to not not have visual range of the contact until we're almost in position so let's put another phase line right about here that way somebody if we said this phase line right if we cross this phase line right here we'll know that we're almost there on top of the objective so let's go ahead and drop another one in there we'll drop it like right here so that's a good one see if it loads and we'll call this one phase line squid word we will make it let's see sort of light blue that'll work so yeah that's sort of keeping a theme it kind of helps kind of helps things as well i'm not going to put phase lines for blue here uh just because of you know time constraints and it's once you've done a couple of these you'll know how to do the others so now we've got a product that's starting to take place here now let's say for instance that like i said you know cell phone jamming is kind of an issue right so what i'm going to want to do is go back here to our target let's say right here in the city and i want to avoid direct line of sight to the city so i'm going to go over here to elevation tools once again we're going to do another view shed once again drop one let's drop it right there i'm sorry i forgot to select it drop it right there and let's close that out for a second let's see if it reaches all the way to our target yeah it does alright cool so if i'm in this red here i'm not going to be in direct line of sight to this city which means that if i'm using a cell phone i'm most likely going to be connecting to towers over here to the north right unless i pop over this ridge line then there's most likely a cell tower somewhere down here now if your uh communications dudes and your operation dudes or or whoever is on top of their stuff they can give you a kmz of all of the cell towers in this area so you can more accurately make your route to avoid any potential electronic surveillance but we don't have that capability so what we're going to do is set up a good spot that we can pop back over to to make a radio call back north back to say maybe our vehicle right and where we have a bigger repeater so let's go ahead and drop another point right here in this red spot this will be our good radio zone it's nice and clear there's not a whole lot of uh vegetation but we want to we want to stick we don't want to be out in the open we want to be able to get in there very easily without our footprints coming around so let's go ahead and put it right about so right about here use a point dropper again let's see if we have a different symbol here maybe a different symbol that we can use let's see markers now okay generic icons no these are all numbers i forgot let's say google's probably got something look here yeah sure why not we'll just use that for the telephone for a while and that will be our point and we can change the name of it to uh radio site there you go and so you can start building these products and start start putting these things together um just by using atac and because a lot of times you're you're stuck using google earth to kind of figure out okay what's a good you know what's a good place to put you know our radio things like that um where's a good site to set up well you know this is a lot easier and as you can see the 3d the 3d element of atac is not as good as google the reason that it's kind of hanging up here is because even i i've used this for quite a while now and even i don't i'm not used to it yet because to swivel this way to swivel along this axis you have to hold down your right mouse and then to swivel up and down you have to hold down mouse three your scroll wheel click and then holding down left mouse allows you to just move your eyeball point around so it takes a little bit of getting used to it is very different from google as when you start using this if you were used to having the google uh scroll wheel uh key doing everything you're gonna have to adapt um but yeah so this is this is how a product starts coming together all right now let's say i need an emergency egress route let's say i need to get the heck out of there because there's some kind of weather or storm or something like that well looks like i can make it down to this road here pretty good and then i can just follow that road all the way up to my vehicle or something like that or say that i need supplies something like that i can put in another point let's go ahead and drop in another point here this site right here looks like the last sorry hung up there for a second this site here looks like the last little bit see where it starts looks like there's a ridge line right here or some kind of soft ridge line that kind of obscures so you can be seen from the city down there but right here you can't be looks like a nice wide area right here with a blind curve around it so i can put in a resupply point right there let me put in um use i'll just use another spot i'll put a put an orange point we'll put that as uh potential resupply resupply one we'll just make it like that see there you go and this is pretty cool and you know a lot of us are familiar with doing this in either something like palantir or gaia or even something like google earth if you're if you're not one of the high speed dudes you don't have access to those tools but for the civilian side this is really a very very powerful tool because you can make these mission graphics and things like that and you don't have to uh don't really have to have a huge amount of of resources and also if someone's here using this when tag you can connect with a network so that you can actually monitor this stuff real time so say you've got dudes sitting in this lpop right and they are observing down there well you'll see on your map when they start dropping points so you can even call in threats and say look hey look i see there's a vehicle somewhere so i can just go ahead right click real quick make it a hostile point and boom send it to them instantly uh okay so yeah here are our uh here's our operation right this is just a very bare bones route it's it's basically just a hiking gps file that you can load into a gps but if you're using atac you have the ability to do a lot of different things say that you're coming up here you're almost to phase line spongebob here and you spot a uh a game camera or something like that and you want to kind of avoid that so that you're not you know being surveilled say that it's right here you can very quickly right click and drop a point right there and this is a contact and you can change this and edit this here in the thing i don't know if i would label this as a contact or just a point because it's kind of static the game camera is a static thing but let's just put this in there sorry my keyboard is hanging up for just a second there we go and there you go you can put a game camera right there or something like that you can change the symbol on this if you were to drop a point and all that kind of stuff but this is most likely what your your dude in the field is going to be doing uh from the actual atac app it takes a half a second to drop a point and you can convert it to whatever you want here back at your home sort of station right so let's say that you make it all the way up here to your lpop site and you say you know i really don't like it let me go ahead and move it a little bit let's go ahead and move it down the hill a little ways say that like that's a better spot there you go that's how you move a target so you click on it and then you've got this nice radial menu here and without even having to edit anything you can go ahead and click that button and that turns it into a nice more precision tool right and then you can move it around say i want to move it around to let's see right there in the shade of that bush that'll be a good spot right so say that that's that's your your new lpop site uh and once you get established and things like that you can use other different symbols and things down here on your target so say that you are you're in position here and you're looking at your uh your vehicles here on the ground looks like let's see if there's any military vehicles for real here in this image i don't really see any unless there's like a c12 or something down there that looks like a civilian aircraft let's see yeah now it looks just like normal civilian traffic but let's just say that a uh a c-130 or something lands in the parks like right here well what you can do is go ahead and drop a point and then instead of spot map we can go down here to vehicles there you go what did i say c130 there you go click c130 drop it right there and that will drop the actual size of the c130 on the map which is pretty cool and yeah so that's how you do that and you can of course change it by moving around moving the heading around and things like that so from your radial menu that's how you change which direction that it's pointed in let's say it's parked right there just like that and let's say that it's actually not there it's moved back a little bit move it back a little ways oh it's too far it's in the building move it forward a little bit yeah that's that's a good parking spot for it and as you can see here that shows the actual size of that aircraft on the ground and that's very helpful for mission planning and things like that so yeah that's pretty much how you can use atac for just a simple let's go see what's going on over there mission and you can make it much more of instead of just being hey let's go up there and see what we can see it can actually be a legitimate planned operation now of course this is uh this is not even baby steps this is like way before baby steps when it comes to things like actual military operation planning and the you know mdmp and stuff like that but this does give a lot of people a very simple uh way to use atac in their everyday missions for the civilian world now for the military world obviously atac has so many other uses that we can't even possibly cover all of them but for the civilian side of things we will be covering a lot more stuff like this so hopefully this was helpful for everyone um if you have any questions just please let us know drop them in the comments box below we have about a dozen different videos already uh being planned to show you how to do specific things within atac and then it's up to you it's to to have the flexibility to put all this stuff together so uh if you're just trying to use this to plan an operation like this a very small level operation that it's fine you can use atac for that as well so yeah this was just a very short primer on how you can use atac to increase your your mission you know planning efforts and things like that and really be sort of you know a very good asset to your team or family or just you know yourself or whatnot so yeah please be on the lookout for the future videos we're going to have coming out on atac we're going to show you how to do a lot of cool different stuff in atac but this this time around we just wanted to show you some of the very basic features um and stuff that you know maybe hasn't quite been talked about in a civilian context just yet so um we're going to be you know talking a little bit a little bit of doctrine in the future a little bit of atac tactics things stuff like that but this time we're just trying to get you just show you what the flavors are out there for you to choose from when it comes to atex so yeah that's really all we've got for now make sure to like comment and subscribe if you think that this stuff was useful and make sure to follow us on our other platforms as well just so you don't miss any of our other content that's all we've got for this time so always remember to fight in the shade you

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to be showing you how to use mesh tastic along with AAC chances are if you're watching this video you know what AAC is or at least have heard of it before but if you're new to mesh tastic a brief description of how mesh tastic works and what it is is needed before we go into the tutorial mesh tastic is an off-grid open-source communications platform you can research this yourself a little bit more on mesh tastics website but short version of how M tastic works is very simple so say you need to send a message from one person to another Well ordinarily you could use text messaging using cell towers or you could use some kind of internet-based chat like you know signal or telegram or something like that but what if the cell towers are down or the internet is out or you're in an area which doesn't have either of those well mesh tastic can bring the infrastructure to you all you need to do is pair each device with a small mesh tastic board and messages can be sent between those two boards using Bluetooth to connect to each smart device and you can use the app on the smartphones to send the messages so that's basically how mesh tastic works it's very simple mesh tastic itself is a very basic mapping software with a very basic messaging service but what if we could take mesh tastics ability to use these mesh tastic boards here these little $25 radios essentially is what they are uh what if we could take those and use another app with that say AAC well let's Jump Right In and figure out how to do that on the hardware side of things you really only need two things you need a smart device that is capable of running Android um you can use any kind of operating system I'll show you what operating system these are running on in just a second and the other piece of Hardware that you need is a mesh tastic device now for our demonstrations here this is just a standard mesh tastic device um that has been modified just a a little bit um to uh turn the screen off and to have a series of batteries behind it so uh but other than that this is just your standard uh mesh tastic device so obviously at minimum you're going to need two smartphones and two mesh tastic devices uh that's really all you need to get your basic Network going but you can of course add as many as you want as time goes on and when it comes to software you're going to need three things as well now before I mention that I just briefly want to mention that this particular device is even running normal stock Android this is CeX OS this is just uh one of the um degoogle operating systems it is a uh competitor to graphine OS and lineage OS uh CX is just the new hotness in that regard this can change uh just wanted to point out that you don't even need standard Android to run this uh so this is just a simple file browser application to show you the three pieces of software that you need also I should mention you don't even need to be connected to Wi-Fi to do this this you can do this entire uh process Wi-Fi free which is great um because all you need to do is have these three files on a thumb drive pass that off to someone and you can get this set up from absolute Bare Bones nothing without using Wi-Fi in an AER environment if you need so the three pieces of software you're going to need are of course the mesh tastic app so that's the very first one there again mesh tastic as of the release of this video it um it's not in the Play Store right now you have to side load it from GitHub so again the link to that will be in the description just like always secondly uh is AAC now AAC is in the play store but I have found that their latest version which I think is 4.5.1 or two or something like that uh that didn't work for me uh again this is one of those things that is a little a little frustrating for people who are trying to get this up and going you have to have the right version numbers for everything some versions don't work with some phones it's a little bit frustrating at times but fortunately as of 4.5.0 uh the team here has had no problem getting this to work so again mesh tastic whatever latest version you want to get a the AAC app which I have again side loaded because I don't want to download it from the Play Store I want to choose what version I want and again this operating system doesn't even have the play store so you kind of need to side load it on this particular operating system and then thirdly is a plugin you're going to need a plugin for AAC that will allow it to talk to mesh tastic and we will will again put the link to all of this in the description below so the first step is to install mesh tastic so we're going to go ahead and click the APK there and we can go ahead and go through the uh package installer process uh you might have to go into your settings depending on what version of Android you have you might have to go in there into your settings and click allow uh unknown sources to install apps uh but for the most part you should be good to go you'll get a prompt uh to do that once you have mesh tastic installed you can move on to installing AAC again same process could not be easy install using the package installer and you're you're done with AAG and and before you move on to installing the plugin you might want to go through the process of setting up AAC so if you haven't done that before go ahead and check out our video on how to install AAC it's very simple to do once you have AAC fully installed and all good to go and you've started downloading imagery and you're getting your app set up now you can go ahead and click the APK for the plug-in again use uh the package installer to install it now the plugin will not leave an icon it will not leave an app on your home screen uh what you're going to have to do is go back into AAC so let's go ahead and do that now the next step is to get mesh tastic and AAC to talk together so that they can communicate data and send data over uh using the mesh tastic Network that we're creating with our mesh tastic devices so to do that let's make sure that our plug-in is in fact installed in AAC and working so let's go ahead and open up our menu here we're going to scroll down to plugins and we'll tap plugins and boom there we go ACH forward is in it's loaded and uh it's current so this is all good that means everything is functioning as normal with the plug-in now we need to configure the plugin to make sure that it does in fact talk to mesh tastic so let's go ahead and do that we're going to open up our menu again we're going to scroll all the way down to settings tap settings scroll down just a little ways until you see tool preferences uh this will allow us to have uh access to this menu which shows the aack forward preferences basically this is just a settings menu for that plugin so let's go ahead and tap that now here we go this is where we can configure all of this stuff to make mesh tastic work so the very first thing you're going to do is select a com device now when you tap that it's going to bring up a menu to allow you to select your mesh tastic device there you go as you can see mine's already paired because we again just to make sure that mesh tastic is working and that's all good um it's already there it's already connected so you don't really need to do too much about that there's also one other thing that you need to do in the AAC app that is very very important at least for this version combination again like I mentioned AAC has a version mesh tastic has a version and the plug-in has a version number and they all get updated by different people and different teams at different times and sometimes there's a little bit of wonkiness between all of them um but I've noticed that on this particular version you absolutely have to make sure to set the region inside the aack app even if you have done it in mesh tastic before so this is one of those things that just make sure you do it or else you're not you're going to be frustrated it took me a while to figure this out that you have to actually go inad and select us now you should be good to go um your mesh tastic devices uh once you duplicate this on the other phone will start talking to one another and exchanging data one of the other settings you might want to check and and change is the mode and speed so this is just a standard mesh tastic setting uh basically with mesh tastic you can have either fast or long range but not both um right here in the middle uh this medium range and and fast is kind of the middle ground where you're going to get a medium range uh whatever that means for your environment and a decently fast transmission speed this is good for AAC because again if you're using ATAC to send messages in a sort of tactical environment you don't want to send you don't want to have a refresh rate of like a minute or more um that's why the uh longer range settings and these slower speeds are not recommended for use with aack again you can choose whichever speed you want um I found that the medium range works well for me and the rest of the team here uh seems to work just fine and uh it allows us to send messages decently fast but also with a a decently good range as well so once we've got everything configured we've got everything on the same mesh tastic Channel sharing the same QR code and everything we can actually see each other's devices in our contacts so if we go to contacts on both devices here we can see that phone one is there and phone two is there and we could send messages back and forth actually we could send let's just see here let me go ahead and type one out just to show you the keyboard does work test one and send it and there we go it already appeared on this device over here you just click the little geoch chat icon and there you go test one let's go ahead and respond uh aack is pretty cool because it has these little little icons here you click send Roger and then wait just a second and it should come through on this other device here decently quickly so that's pretty cool uh you also don't have to send just text messages back and forth using the mesh tastic devices to communicate you can send other data as well so let's go ahead and illustrate that let's drop a point here let's drop an enemy contact off to the off to the West here let's get rid of that and let's say all right cool uh this particular phone just saw this particular contact at this at this grid location let's go ahead and send it to the other device so uh let's go ahead and tap your icon there open up the icons menu and there we have information about the point now what you can do is Click down here at the bottom you can set it to Auto send so that if I change the location of this it will send it automatically which is pretty cool as you can see boom it already appeared on this device but if you wanted to specify who in your group it's sent to uh you can send it to specific contacts and I'll send it again and there we go these devices are again communicating on just mesh tastic which is pretty cool so that's how you can use mesh tastic to send and receive data back and forth now of course the the more amounts of data you use the quicker you're going to run through your mesh tastic battery and your phone battery as well so that's something to keep in mind so why would something like this be useful well there are many different reasons but especially in today's world I think a lot of people are trying to figure out ways of making their Communications a bit more secure a bit more censorship proof uh especially without using cellular or internet-based Technologies and mesh networks just the very nature of how mesh networks in general work is very good for that so what would this look like in real life well let's say that we live here in this city and we have a group of friends who live in various places across town and they need the ability to communicate with each other and share information and share data without using the internet and without using a cell tower now you can use radios for that conventional handheld radios but what if you want to use your handheld radios for like voice Communications and you don't want to have to constantly send each other updated positions and things like that well a mesh Network like mesh tastic would be great for this because if every single person had a mesh tastic device and had aack running and things like that they would be able to share their location and other data with each other seamlessly this would allow each person to serve as a node so that everyone can talk to everyone else this means that mesh networks like mesh tastic are very very resilient especially when operating in less an ideal conditions or in non-permissive environments for instance if this guy right here gets either struck in some kind of war zone or gets raided or something like that and that node goes offline well the rest of the network can still survive without that particular node now again everyone has to have at least a few connections to a node so like this guy up here uh if if he is not connected but to just one person and that node gets taken offline well he's kind of out of luck but again this is where the resiliency of mesh networks come in because all you would need to do is set up an additional node uh somewhere else in the city to bridge the gap and then there you go this guy is connected to everybody else once again and considering the highly mobile nature of mesh tastic it's a simple little device it's very cheap they cost about 25 bucks and the software is all free so really you can set up a lot of different repeaters all over your city and that way you can make sure that you have a very very resilient network but that's just mesh tastic that's just what mesh tastic can do by itself why do we need it to talk to AAC AAC is a very specific Suite of software the TAC Suite of software is is made for a very specific use for a very specific set of users mostly a military use and really AAC isn't really worth very much unless it can communicate with other Tac devices if you're by yourself and you're using AAC on your phone and you don't have it connected to anything else you don't have it connected to a server or via a radio to anybody else you're going to find that AAC is a little bit lackluster you're going to find that it doesn't really have very much use but if it's connected to other devices in a mesh Network like mesh tastic ah well there it could shine so let's say that this group of friends is living in the worst case scenario which would be in a war zone let's just say this city turns into a war zone and this guy right here is you know doing his job and he is setting up an observation post to kind of monitor traffic and see what's going on here and there and let's just say that he Witnesses a mechanized infantry unit moving across this bridge well if he has aack using mesh tastic as the radio what he can do is drop that on his map and boom that gets instantly sent to every other node in the network all without using the internet and all without using a cell tower this is very handy especially if you're living in a non-permissive environment or you're trying to plan for the worst case scenario and make your Communications plan a lot more survivable and resilient even in the worst case scenario and speaking of worst case scenarios let's throw in another Factor electronic warfare let's say that an enemy jamming unit moves into this area and starts just jamming the signals uh from this side of the city south of the river here well of course you're going to have these two nodes within the realm of jamming uh go offline but as you can see the rest of the network still functions so obviously if there's any kind of jamming these mesh tastic devices put out such a very low power there's really no way that you can overcome jamming of of really any kind uh with a mesh tastic device but again if that jamming were to go away uh these nodes would again reconnect to the rest of the network which is very handy handy but jamming itself is going to be very very difficult to do as we'll touch on here in just a second but what if there isn't jamming going on what if we have a more likely scenario such as enemy interception and Direction finding units moving into the area so you've got an electronic surveillance station set up that's just listening for any kind of signals in the area and you've got a couple of Direction finding units that are sweeping around trying to find out where signals are coming from well for one mesh tastic signals are in encrypted with AES 256bit encryption so it's going to be almost impossible for anyone to break that communication there are I'm sure there are ways it can be done but for the most part like we've mentioned before AES 256 is really the best you're going to get and AES 256 is really so secure that I personally wouldn't really worry about it I'm not worried about it myself what I am worried about is Direction finding that's a much more big threat because it doesn't really matter if you encrypt your signals with the most best encryption you could possibly find if someone can narrow down your uh transmission site well that can give you that can give an adversary information about you but here's the cool part about mesh tastic mesh tastic uses the 9915 MHz band here in the United States in other countries that's different you have to buy different mesh tastic device depending on where you're at in the world but for the most part every country has a very very small part of the bandwidth uh part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is for uh commercial use this is a set of frequencies a very small range that can be used without a license in the United States provided you abide by power levels you can't go out blasting 1,000 Watts on 915 megaherz that's just doesn't work like that but the reason that this is so significant is that so many other different kinds of sources use 9915 MHz everything from traffic toll booths to Smart devices like a refrigerator or something like that or uh your electronic um power meter uses these a lot of times to transmit data wirelessly uh traffic lights in some areas use this so really a lot of devices in a city especially in a modern world use 900 the 915 MHz band to transmit on so what does this mean for direction finding well with so many different kinds of devices running on 915 MHz if someone were to try to Direction find 915 MHz signals in a city this is what it would look like they would find signals everywhere this means that for all intents and purposes 915 MHz and specifically mesh tastic devices that operate on these frequencies have what we call a low probability of intercept meaning that we recognize that in the world of radio communications there is no real way to make a radio signal impossible to detect by an outside force you're always if transmitting something on the radio waves you're going to someone else is going to be able to pick that up but mesh tastic devices since they use this very unique frequency and it's a very hard to detect frequency in the first place but it's also there because there's so much background noise and mesh tastic is using so little power to transmit this means that mesh tastic is a great great option for communicating in an environment in which you know there's electronic surveillance so with all of this being said is mesh tastic and AAC together a complete solution to a Communications problem the answer to that is no attac and mesh tastic even by themselves or even when working together are not a complete solution we actually see this a lot in the military as well an over Reliance on AAC is currently resulting in a lot of cool dudes losing a lot of skills the number of special operators that get lost because they were relying on attack alone to navigate is astounding So currently our military forces are dealing with a loss of skills due to an overreliance on this kind of technology so if we were to rephrase the question a little bit by saying is mesh tastic and attac a good way to supplement your other comms while providing an infrastructure for sharing geospatial data well the answer to that is yes but again in the civilian sector another downfall rears its ugly head and that is that a lot of people think that aack is the greatest things since sliced bread simply because they see a cell phone on a cool guy's plate carrier remember AAC was developed for the military for military use it's great that today we're seeing people make this software suite more useful for the civilian sector that's great and we would love to see more of that but do not feel pressured to use aack if you do not have a use for it a lot of people get caught up in using aack just for the sake of the technology and because it's cool and they don't actually have a real end use for it remember no Communications plan is foolproof there is no perfect solution to any of this in the communications world we unfortunately have to live with compromises on pretty much everything there is no goldilock Zone when it comes to Communications this radio is not secure enough or this radio is too expensive or impossible to buy as a civilian or this one has expensive accessories to make it work or batteries that are hard to find and this setup is no different one glaringly obvious vulnerability of this system is the Bluetooth the connection between the phone and the mesh tastic board again it doesn't matter how secure your mesh tastic 9915 MHz communication is if someone close to you can easily exploit that Bluetooth connection a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and some people might find that vulnerability unacceptable I myself would agree that Bluetooth in a combat situation is probably not ideal but what about anything less than a total war situation I'm myself willing to live with the mcon concerns that Bluetooth brings in some situations but others may not other people might not have a problem with the Bluetooth seeing as the dod is itself incorporating Bluetooth into a lot of their new devices but they might be skeptical of the aack app itself since it is created by the military there is a lot of mystery there that's its own can of worms and some people might not like that either and that's fine I think that Sid loading the app and never turning on Wi-Fi seems like a a good option but some people might not want to do that the point is mesh tastic might be a good option to actually get some use out of the tools that AAC provides in a mostly seamless way I honestly think that this combination is the first major breakthrough that makes attack worth it for civilian use I can take this setup and be sitting at a coffee shop observing and collecting information and no one would be the wiser because I can keep the mesh tastic board in a pocket I'm just some guy flipping through a smartphone at a coffee shop good luck trying to Route cables to a radio in an environment like that and with that I can communicate to a buddy across town who's out for a casual hike and doesn't want to bring several pounds of tactical equipment along I can cover an entire city with dozens of mesh tastic devices functioning as repeaters for a fraction of what even just one high power repeater would cost and since they are so small even with an attached solar panel one could hide them in a lot of places where a repeater might not be able to fit and if one gets detected or stolen or lost it's not a big deal because it only cost me 25 bucks yeah the Bluetooth is a bit unfortunate for some situations and sure AAC isn't perfect or even useful all the time every situation will be different and everyone will have different levels of what they deem to be acceptable levels of risk would I trust my life to this setup no but I also wouldn't trust my life to AAC running on a government phone hooked up to a $5,000 radio either it's a communication tool to make some things easier that's it and now that we've been testing AAC with mesh tastic for a few months now this seems like this might be pretty handy to have especially at the price point of buying a $25 board and some free open source software which is why we wanted to show everyone how to link up AAC with mesh tastic because even though this is really still in development this technology works very well right now and will only get better over time so check it out and see if AAC and mesh tastic could be valuable additions to your Communications plan

…Most of us are going to be using ATAK for

…https://nexus-s2underground.hub.arcgis.com/ ## KMZs for ATAK: https://github.com/s2underground/GhostMaps ## Downloadable Tools ArcGIS Field Maps App - Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esri.fieldmaps - iOS: https://apps.apple…

## ICOD: 1000Z March 12, 2026 ## Situation Not Monitored: Real-time situation monitoring shifted to standard ATAK feeds. [[Incident Response Links]] [[Event Log Template]]