Overview of TAK (Team Awareness Kit)

The TAK capability suite is a product owned by the United States Government. This TAK plugin is an independently-implemented adapter to allow a properly authorized YAAC user to connect to a TAK network to share information with other TAK users.

TAK stands for Team Awareness Kit (or Tactical Assault Kit for the restricted-access military version of TAK). TAK is the US Government's premier tool for shared Situational Awareness data and has a large number of features designed to facilitate real-time coordination between team members (although only a few of these features are available through the YAAC/TAK plugin).

Although TAK is a Situational Awareness/Common Operating Picture tool conceptually similar to APRS, it differs from APRS in several ways:

  1. TAK's foundations are significantly newer than APRS. APRS was originally created back in 1984, whereas TAK first started implementation in 2002.
  2. TAK's environment is significantly more restricted than APRS. Whereas anyone of any nationality with an amateur radio license can use and share APRS data (subject to their local and national jurisdiction's regulations), access to the data on a TAK network is restricted to specifically-authorized users with a need-to-know, per standard military and emergency response policies.
  3. In harmony with the restricted need-to-know, there is not just one TAK backbone network (equivalent to the APRS-IS). Instead, any particular mission can spin up its own TAK network (or multiple networks) with its own authorization and authentication keys, independent of any other TAK network, to maintain proper data isolation and partitioning.
  4. TAK data is sent over encrypted communications links to help ensure data privacy, whereas APRS data must be sent in-the-clear per national and international amateur radio regulations.
  5. For anything more than the most geographically-localized TAK network, a centralized TAKserver is used to selectively route network data between TAK clients according to the mission needs. Although this TAKserver can be deployed with redundant components for increased reliability and capacity, the TAKserver as a whole is still a central control point for a TAK network, issuing the authentication and authorization keys to permit clients to connect to the server. APRS, on the other hand, is a decentralized peer-to-peer network, with only the APRS-IS backbone as a central (but highly redundant and not necessarily required) component of an APRS network.
  6. TAK assumes significantly more network bandwidth is available than APRS. Instead of using a tightly encoded single line of plain text data, a single TAK message is an XML document using the CoT (Cursor-on-Target schema) that can be up to 40 kilobytes in size (or a slightly smaller Google Protocol Buffers encoding of the same message).
  7. TAK requires Internet (or locally set-up intranet) TCP/IP network access to operate, whereas APRS can operate over much less technically advanced RF networks.
  8. TAK uses 3-dimensional coordinates for all targets, whereas altitude is optional for APRS and it is assumed any station or object without an altitude value is on the ground at its specified latitude and longitude. Part of the problem transcribing this between APRS and TAK is that when APRS uses altitude, it is relative to Mean Sea Level (MSL), whereas TAK's altitude/elevation data is Height Above the Ellipsoid (HAE) for the WGS84 model.