PiRaTN for ATAK Demo

[@spr00sem00se]

THIS is awesome, about 11 years ago i tried to send morsecode from an arduino over a pair of pmr radios, and have the recieving radio output the text to an LCD.............. I succesfully got it to send a few characters in a repeatable manner, but couldnt predictably send a string of text. I still really want to get that working, but this is the ultimate incarnation of what I wanted to do with it. PIR sensors connected to PMR radios is something that I still want to work out.

[@largerification]

Check out Meahtastic

[@waylonk2453]

I am impressed by your wide range of skills. Subscribed!

[@richardkennedy815]

I am very interested in this. Presently working on setting up the crossband radio manpack. I think ATAK and a setup like this would complete the picture. Hope you do a follow up and more work on this.

[@RamsesHarrysson]

does the rasperry wifi is configured as acesspoint? what setting do you use inside ATAK as audio device?

[@RamsesHarrysson]

do i understand correctly that the usb-hub is there only because you did not want to solder soundcard 4pins to raspberrypi?

[@polarexpeditionmedic]

Very interesting, I missed the point were the WIFI comes from ? I understand that is were the phones connect to but the wired hardware is not generating a wifi right ?

[@k6nvg541]

I'm definitely interested in this. Maybe try one of those right angle micro USB cords?

[@folkishappalachian6827]

Can I use a digital ham radio in place of analog with this? I would like to use anytone 878 since it has same connection ports as feng uv5r

[@ManuelPinner]

you know you can use the Kenwood D75A handheld with built-in TNC, for this without all this stuff, you can directly connect your phone via Bluetooth to the TNC and transmit Akak text through the D75A I have one myself,

[@RamsesHarrysson]

the main IDEA is that you can use whatever radios you have, so that the rest of rebel unit you command, dont have to start searhing Kenwood stuff

[@10a3asd]

I was going to bitch that you'd beat me to it lol, but after watching the video, we're coming at this from two very different angles. It's kind of a bummer top see how long transmission of two words took.

[@sniporbob]

The data being sent in addition to the two words is rather extensive. If you turn those two words into five whole sentences you might add one second to the transmission time. Probably less than that. The message itself is a very tiny part of the transmitted data.

[@ataksza2731]

Awesome - you mentioned doing a similar solution with LORA - have you got this working and will you be releasing a video on how to build one ?

[@sniporbob]

I did successfully test out using an RNode radio. It worked quite well. The setup is essentially the same as this, except the RNode plugs in to the Pi Zero via usb instead of requiring audio cables. The RNode can be configured as a TNC, so direwolf is not needed if you're using that. Simply run tncattach and point it at the tnc created by the rnode. I probably won't bother making a video though. Meshtastic is likely to be more useful for basic use cases (location, chat, map markers), and AREDN will be more useful for higher throughput requirements (pictures, attachments, etc).

[@Mekial111]

Dude, this is nice. How much was the setup, Minus the radio?

[@RJSteed]

What are the other components on the bread board? Thought I seen different components on project box bread board (when you flipped it) as well.

[@sniporbob]

The circuit board schematic is on the github page (link in video description). The red 3D printed housing in the video looks like it has several circuit boards attached, but these are all the same components that were laid out on the counter. I just removed the plastic coverings off of them and exposed the circuit boards so that I could save space when mounting them inside the red housing.

[@vmev1516]

Could this work with the Mobilinkd TNC? Instead of putting all that together, which is impressive by the way, but I am not very smart to built something like that. And if I could I would rather use something that is already available

[@sniporbob]

Unfortunately no, you can't use the Mobilinkd. At least not without creating your own plugin for ATAK. Natively, ATAK can only work over either the cell network or over wifi, so the reason my device works is it takes the wifi data and converts it to audio for transmitting over the radio. You'd need a plugin to convert to audio and then have it sent over bluetooth in order for the Mobilinkd to function.

[@CzechSixTv]

@@sniporbob Couldn't a Pi 4 B with integrated Wifi and Bluetooth handle data transfer between phone and TNC without a sound card? As I'm seeing it, ATAK would send data over Wifi to the Raspberry Pi which would then send the data over Bluetooth to the TNC which would do the audio encoding/decoding.The Mobilinkd 3 can even handle PTT. Then again, if using the Mobilinkd 3, couldn't you just add a Bluetooth dongle to the Pi you are already using?

[@JUBA223]

What phones were you using

[@tagairsoft]

Is the ATAK public again? Because a few months ago it wasn't on GPlay

[@John_Prophet]

Love this! So I want one, I however am not this talented. How much for me to order 2 of these? I could print my own housing if that would be easier. I do have a couple questions with this also. 1st, how are you using voice comms? Is it all ran only through the radio? Would using a cell phone battery reduce the size and weight of this?

[@sniporbob]

So to answer your questions...1) Voice comms have to be done with a separate radio, and preferably on a separate frequency. 2) Yes everything you see in the video was done through the radio. Anytime you see a "Broadcast" button in ATAK, it works with this setup. Not all features of ATAK work with this, nor are they realistically feasible. Sending a multi megabyte photo at 1.2kbps is going to take a long time and disrupt everything else on the network. 3) A cell phone battery (or in more general terms, a prismatic battery) would work. It would reduce the weight very slightly because they don't have a metal can like the 18650 batteries do. The tradeoff is they're more susceptible to damage when carrying spares, the shapes and sizes of cell phone batteries aren't standardized like 18650s are, and mounting requires more precision and is generally less secure than this setup with the 18650s. I don't know if cell phone batteries in particular have a built in low voltage cutoff or if that's handled by the phone's hardware. That would be something to research. If not built in to the battery, this device is liable to run the battery completely down to 0 volts and damage it. The 18650 board I used had a low voltage cutoff to prevent damage to the 18650s. Either way, a boost converter is needed to supply the Pi with 5V, so there's always going to be a need for a power supply board of some sort, and this one made everything much quicker and easier to test because I didn't have to design it myself. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to discuss prices. My email address is simply my channel name at yahoo dot com. I'll give you a rundown of what all the individual components cost.

[@m.col.6440]

How much would you charge to build one of these pi setups? Don't need the case or radio just the pie and its components to make it work with the radio.

[@sniporbob]

I've got a breakdown of all the component costs. Shoot me an email and I'll send it to you, and we can have a chat about price! My email address is my channel name at yahoo dot com.

[@kschlick8229]

How much would it be to have you program the SDR card for me? Just getting in to all of this can't find a good video on how to program from github to the card, in less I'm missing something.

[@sniporbob]

You might have missed the instructions on the github page. If you scroll down on the github page you should see them. It walks you through all the steps to install all the related software, and so far a couple of people have been successful. However, if you still want I can program the SD cards for you, and you'd just plug it into your own PiRaTN hardware. Feel free to shoot me an email to discuss further. My channel name at yahoo.com.

[@dennismortensen4171]

Hi is is posible for you to make a small number of them (4) and send them???

[@bluerhinoconstruction205]

So phones sends signal via Bluetooth, to pi , pi to radio and the radio transmits the text of the phone to the radio waves then reverse the process on the other end.. ? And how long can you go on distance ?

[@sniporbob]

Almost. It goes from phone to Pi using wifi, but otherwise that's about right. The range would depend on a lot of things. Radio power output, antenna, terrain, etc. I haven't done much range testing with these yet except for a bit in the residential area. It doesn't do so great because of all the houses. The best was 0.85 miles straight through a bunch of homes. Now if you had perfect line of sight from one radio to the other, like from a valley up to a mountain peak, the range would probably be tens of miles. I would expect similar performance to APRS because it's transmitting the data in the same manner.

[@bluerhinoconstruction205]

sniporbob were do I get the software? For the Pi ?

[@sniporbob]

@@bluerhinoconstruction205 Instructions are on the github page. See the video description.

[@hamx2y]

how many clients could connect using this method? Would it run into heavy issues once two data packages are sent at once accidentally or is that handled?

[@sniporbob]

It would depend on how frequently position updates were needed. More frequent position updates means fewer clients. I don't have any numbers because I only have two android devices to run ATAK on. The software (direwolf) attempts to delay transmission until the channel is clear. If two transmissions happen to occur at almost the exact same time they can collide and render both unusable, but if there's enough delay that direwolf detects an ongoing transmission it will wait.

[@hamx2y]

@@sniporbob thanks for the insight. Yeah its all very theoretical at the moment obviously. I guess ill have to try for myself but i guess itll only be two units at first. Ill post some results on the reddit when i get to trieing it out

[@folkishappalachian6827]

which do you prefer? Aredn or LoRa for atak?

[@AgentJeffy]

How do you prevent the Pi from trying to broadcast the data messages the Android phone is trying to send out?

[@sniporbob]

I'm not sure what you mean. It's kind of the point that the Pi broadcasts all of the data from ATAK over the radio. Could you clarify further?

[@AgentJeffy]

@@sniporbob so android tries to contact servers to check for updates. Other apps run in the background. Does the Pi prevent those apps from being able to contact their servers and ONLY broadcast traffic from ATAK?

[@sniporbob]

@@AgentJeffy Ok thanks, I understand now. Yep, this setup is looking specifically for the multicast traffic coming from ATAK and only forwards those messages over the radio. In a previous attempt I simply bridged the radio and the wifi, but that method forwarded all that junk you're talking about over the radio too and it never shut up haha. It was completely unusable. This version doesn't do that. It uses socat to forward data between wifi and the virtual interface of the radio, and it only sends the data coming from ATAK by checking for data on specific multicast addresses and ports that ATAK uses.

[@RamsesHarrysson]

in android only the blutooth is needed/switched on. android wont seek its updates from blutooth channels anyway if the updte feature is shwitched on

[@0780marco]

Hello, lay person here. So you are using the radios to transmit? While cellular data is down? Correct?

[@sniporbob]

Correct, that would be the main use for this.

[@0780marco]

sniporbob can you use a more powerful/ higher quality radio? And do you sell these things? Ship to Florida?haha

[@sniporbob]

@@0780marco Yes you can use a more powerful and/or higher quality radio. It's better that you do. I used baofengs for testing because it seems everyone has one. The PTT circuit might need to be slightly different for other radios, but it should be easy to adjust it for whatever radio you're using. Considering they're so easy to make I hadn't planned on selling them but I suppose I could. It's difficult to order any large quantity of the Raspberry Pi's though. I might have to leave it up to the end user to buy their own Pi's. I haven't finished the enclosure design either so at the moment you'd just get a pile of electronics that you have to stuff into your own box.

[@0780marco]

sniporbob sweet, what would you charge for two complete set ups minus radio? Lol

[@sniporbob]

@@0780marco I'll go figure out how much it all cost. Send me a message over on the ATAK subreddit so we can chat, that way I can make sure I understand exactly what you want.

[@agmsmith4079]

What is the benefit of this over just using a DMR radio?

[@d15roy]

Very impressive! Do you have an idea what is the approximate transmission baud rate is?

[@sniporbob]

The setup in the video was 1200bps AFSK. It's possible to configure direwolf for 2400bps AFSK (if I understand correctly it uses 1200 baud quad AFSK to accomplish this) but the range is reduced and the Pi Zero processor can't reliably keep up unless you turn off some of direwolf's demodulators which further reduces probability of successfully receiving the transmission. Direwolf also allows 9600bps but the radio has to provide a special data input connection. It won't work with a regular microphone input. I don't think the Pi processor could handle it either. I also have this setup now working over RNode LoRa radios but haven't done a video of that yet. With LoRa I have tried both 10938bps (only tested indoors short range) and 2604bps (tested outdoors out to ~0.75 miles non line of sight with consistent successful reception). It probably goes much further, I just ran out of time to continue that test.

[@d15roy]

@@sniporbob Very Interesting! I like the idea of Lora - Less likely to be intercepted or interfered with, Less overall bulk, lower power requirements, possible use of Lora repeaters and/or gateways. One has to bear in mind that most will probably also be carrying a portable radio for purely voice communication as a back-up. In fact I wouldn't venture into the field without one! Looking forward to the results of your Lora tests!

[@JamesStaud]

Very cool! Super stoked about this! Solid work. Did you implement any kind of encryption?

[@JamesStaud]

Is there a way that you know of to keep the radio speaker from outputting sound when the speaker mic is plugged in?

[@sniporbob]

I didn't, but ATAK seems to have the option to handle that on it's own. You'll have to be careful what frequencies you send encrypted data on though.

[@JamesStaud]

@@sniporbob of course. Just curious. Seems like it would be useful for people who live in countries where it's not an issue who want to maintain opsec.

[@sniporbob]

@@JamesStaud It normally doesn't output sound. The only reason you could hear it in the video is because I had another radio on the ground tuned to the same frequency. In normal operation you don't hear anything.

[@JamesStaud]

@@sniporbob ahh ok. I was confused about that. Was thinking that maybe there's some resistance value that has to be correct for the built in speaker mic to be disabled. Awesome! Great work by the way! I'm working on putting your circuit onto a printed PCB right now.

[@uiopuiop3472]

we got a nice big....

[@محمدباقر-ن6ث8ط]

Hello, can you give the download link for the ATAK program

[@sniporbob]

It's on the google play store, or at takmaps.com

[@gringofett3944]

So design a single board to hold all the circuits it will shrink all that form factor.

[@Carthon916]

For whoever complains about "PrOPeRly AnNounCinG" before broadcasting a signal. "YOU" are the problem with the HAM community. Being obsessed with following arbitrary and hypocritical guidelines and laws is killing and dividing the Hobby. That is all

[@kemonoyama2084]

Would have been nice if you added the links to diagrams and build plans and software ect...so pretty much its a useless me video.

[@apach2560]

Sick! Can you make soft installation video??

[@sniporbob]

I might make one at some point after I finish the case design. In the meantime the github instructions should be able to get you through installation.

[@SN7007]

Man, this is outstanding. Great job! I'm in.... N7GLK

[@RJSteed]

What size ferrite did you use?

[@sniporbob]

I'm not actually sure. I bought a variety pack from amazon but I don't think it listed the sizes.

[@bangdollarsign]

_"Search and rescue pack"_ 😆

[@محمدباقر-ن6ث8ط]

Hello, could you just upload the map layers

[@sniporbob]

If you do a google search for ATAK Maps there is a github page with many map layers

[@sorrow2u]

can this work with FTS??

[@sniporbob]

This exact setup: no. The baofeng radios don't send data fast enough, and there's too much of a delay switching from Tx to Rx and back for any sort of reliable TCP connection. If you replace the baofeng with something faster, say an RNode radio, then it becomes more likely to work. I've successfully done TCP communication with the RNode so it could in theory work with FTS. It then becomes a question of whether or not you want to use your limited data rate talking to a server and having that rebroadcast to everyone else, or if the limited data rate is better spent directly sending chat and position to other devices and leaving the server out. You will very quickly reach the limit of the radio's data transfer speed if a server is involved. Also google the "hidden node problem" for another reason why you want to keep transmissions as short as possible. A lengthy TCP message creates a higher probability of such a tx collision arising.

[@apologos10]

Holy shit that's awesome!

[@vincentguerra8029]

So cool

[@michaelmontisfortis]

Good !

[@martinsonofwar395]

Meant to be a bone. Sure it was. 🤨