How to Install ATAK

[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 updat le 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 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 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 pa ke 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 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 u 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 d 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 brin or 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 y itely 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 o ith 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 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