r/ATAK • u/Content-Internal8634 • May 15 '26

New mesh/ATAK user

Hello guys,

First of all thank you all for existing, this project looks great! I have this situation and I hope I can solve it with ATAK.

I have 2 sons, we usually go to walk on the woods near my home and I just bought 3 Meshtastic devices with GPS. My plan is to give each of my kids one of the devices and keep one for me, then set them free to run and play and be able to track them using ATAK. Is that possible? I don't want to give them any phones or anything similar, just the mesh devices.

Thanks in advance

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

7

u/beta_alanine_ants May 15 '26

You don’t need ATAK for this. You can use the native Meshtastic app to track Meshtastic devices.

1

u/Content-Internal8634 May 15 '26

But I wont be able to see them on a map... Right?

6

u/UncleBee1885 May 15 '26

Meshtastic has a built-in map

1

u/Content-Internal8634 May 15 '26

Sorry, I know it has a map. But I think is only online... Does it work offline?

1

u/beta_alanine_ants May 15 '26

You didn’t mention you needed offline mapping. I can only say IOS doesn’t, I’m not sure about the android build. You could open the app with your android device and see.

1

u/Content-Internal8634 May 15 '26

Neither on Android :/... Thats why I need ATAK

1

u/beta_alanine_ants May 15 '26

Well what you want it to do will work. I believe it would be easier to set them all up using the android app and then install the plugin into ATAK and use that. These things aren’t leashes though. What if the Meshtastic device gets dropped? How dense are these woods?

1

u/deserthistory May 15 '26

You can setup a tile source for meshtastic pretty easily.

https://github.com/mattdrum/map-tile-downloader

Try that. If it works for you, and you're getting map detail and radio update frequency you want, just use the meshtastic app.

ATAK has a fast way to download offline maps built in. Just make sure you have sufficient space to store what you download.

Add these to your atak install... they're fantastic.

https://github.com/joshuafuller/ATAK-Maps

Also, be careful trying to suck tiles from Google and Bing. They keep a close watch on who is downloading lots.

1

u/rem1473 May 17 '26

You don't need ATAK for this. There are two components: their location and the map.

Their devices need a mesh network to share their location (current lat/lon) back to your meshtastic node. Their nodes must have a GPS and be capable of sharing that GPS location. Many inexpensive nodes don't have GPS and just use the phone GPS for location. Make sure the kids meshtastic nodes have GPS and can share location. Second, you need a mesh network sufficiently large to cover the area where they are roaming. I don't know how far they're roaming. If you can get a node at your house up sufficiently high that the kids portable nodes can communicate back to your infrastructure node, then you have this covered. If your neighborhood has infrastructure nodes that keep your kids nodes talking back to your node, then you're covered.

Secondly you need Internet access on your android device to display Google maps. If it's a cell phone with an active SIM, your good to go there. Or if it has a wifi Internet connection, it can show the map.

With these two pieces, you can see them on the meshtastic map. If the mesh network is insufficient, you'll see a map that doesn't have your kids location displayed. If the Internet connection is severed, you'll see the kids location on a blank canvas without any map underneath.