R2TAK

What this is

This is the desk side of your TAK system. You bring people in here, decide what their phone gets set up with, and call them out when something happens. The phone side is the app.

You add somebody once. They get a code, and that one code sets up their whole phone — their TAK username, their channels, their map settings, their place on the roster. After that you can page them and send them files, all from here.

What you will use most

1. Enroll — bring somebody in and hand them a code.
2. Device setup — decide what a phone gets set up with.
3. Dashboard — the roster, and everything you do to one person.
4. Send an activation — call people out and see who answers.
5. Live Nets — radio channels for an incident.

Signing in

There are two doors. Most people only ever use the first. There is no separate admin password to keep in step either way.

With your work account

Type your work email on the sign-in page. If your agency has connected its work-account sign-in (Google or Microsoft), a Continue button appears: you land on your own employer’s login screen, sign in there the way you always do, and come back signed in here. No code to pass around.

Two honest limits. It signs people in, never up: a perfectly good work login for somebody who is not on the roster is refused, because the rule is that somebody put you here on purpose. And it matches on the email on your roster entry, which is optional at enrollment — if yours was never filled in, the button works and the sign-in is refused. Ask an administrator to add your email.

With a code

Paste an enrollment code, the same kind a responder’s phone uses. A code works once, on one device. That is deliberate: a code that works twice is a code that can be forwarded. This is also the way back in when the work-account door is shut.

Setting this computer up

1. Sign in, by either door.
2. Go to Settings and set a passphrase.

The passphrase is what makes this computer safe to leave. Without it, anybody who sits down at your desk is signed in as you. With it, the stored sign-in is locked and useless until somebody types it.

A second check: passkeys

Under Settings › Sign-in security you can add a passkey — this device’s own unlock (Face ID, a fingerprint, or its PIN) vouching that it is really you. Nothing to install, nothing to type from another app. Once you have one, every work-account sign-in asks for it; on a day the device cannot read it, we email a one-time code to your address on file instead. Enrollment codes are not affected: a code an administrator minted seconds ago is already a stronger proof than a password, and it is the lockout path.

If you are locked out

• Somebody else is signed in? Ask them to find you on the roster and press New code.
• Nobody is? Use Email me a code on the sign-in page. If your email is on the roster, a code arrives. It works once and expires in 30 minutes.

First twenty minutes

Start to finish, for a brand new agency.

Walk me through it Five steps, on the real screens. Stop any time.

1. Set the agency default. Device setup → Packages → Agency default → Edit. This is what everybody gets unless a package says otherwise. Set the default channels first — they decide who each person can see and hear — then the map key, coordinates, toolbar and team names.
2. Upload your files. Device setup → Files. Icon sets, terrain, map sources. Once here, available to every package.
3. Make a package. Device setup → New package. A package is what a kind of person gets — SWAT, Patrol, Volunteer.
4. Bring one person in. Single Enroll. Pick the package. Hand them the code.
5. Check it landed. Device setup → Who has picked it up.

Who can do what

Six levels. The first three are the ones you will actually hand out; the last two exist because somebody has to run the server.

TAK User

Everybody else. They see their own details, pull their own setup file and QR code, and see the roster — names and callsigns, which is what a phone shows anyway. They do not see other people’s phone numbers or emails. A responder’s phone has no reason to carry the whole agency’s contact list.

Dispatcher

Works this console and carries no phone. Starts and cancels callouts, sees the roster with contact details, and reads the agency’s history. Touches nothing on the roster: no enrolling, no editing, no channel changes.

Enrollment Admin

Whoever is running the sign-up desk at a training day. They bring people in and reset passwords, all day. They cannot edit somebody, remove their access, or revoke a certificate.

Agency Admin

Runs one agency. Everything above, plus editing people, removing access, revoking certificates, setting phone settings, making packages, and making channels for their own agency. This is what almost everybody should be, including the person who runs the busiest agency on the server.

Site Admin

The organization paying for the server. Everything an Agency Admin can do, in every agency on this deployment, plus:

• Making and archiving agencies.
• Moving somebody from one agency to another.
• Making channels for every agency (Global), and marking a channel sensitive.
• Putting a file on the TAK server, or a Data Sync folder.
• Setting up video streams.
• Server Health and the Error log.
• Seeing the whole server — every account on it.
• Making other Site Admins, and Agency Admins anywhere.

Global Admin

Us. Everything a Site Admin can do, plus exactly two things, and they are grouped for one reason: they destroy something permanently and no screen anywhere puts it back.

• Deleting an agency outright. Archiving does everything else — blocks sign-ups, removes access, hides it from the lists — and keeps the record. Deleting erases the history.
• Deleting an account off the TAK server. This is the one that can remove the account this console signs in with, or the server’s own administrator.

A Global Admin cannot be granted from inside the console — not even by another Global Admin. It is set on the server itself, and not because we distrust anybody: if a Global Admin’s session is ever stolen, the attacker already has everything. What they do not have is a way to leave a door open behind them. Keeping this off every screen means you can revoke the stolen account and be finished.

Sensitive channels

A channel can be marked SENSITIVE. Everybody still sees that it exists and that it is marked — only Site Admin and above can see who is in it or change it.

Controls you cannot use are not drawn at all, or are drawn switched off with the reason on them, rather than shown and then refused. If a button you expect is missing, that is usually why.

Agencies

An agency here is a separate roster with its own settings, packages and people. One TAK server can carry many of them — that is the usual shape for a county or a mutual-aid group.

Making a new agency creates a whole new roster, so it takes an operator who covers the deployment rather than one agency. Everything else on that agency’s settings can be changed afterwards.

Bringing people in

Four ways in. Pick by how many people are in front of you.

Single Enroll

One person you are looking at. Name, mobile, package. They get a link and a code.

Group Enroll

A room full of people at once. One code everybody uses; you decide in advance what role, channels and package they all get. Good for a training night.

Bulk Enroll

A list from a spreadsheet. It shows you exactly what it is going to do before it does it, so paste first and read the preview. Everything you set — package, role, team, app — applies to every row.

On the TAK server

People who already exist on the TAK server but are not on your roster here. Adopting one links the two together rather than making a duplicate. Use this when somebody already has a TAK login.

ATAK, WinTAK and other apps

Not everybody runs R2TAK. You can enroll somebody on any TAK app, but how their settings reach them is different, and that catches people out.

Two ways settings travel

1. The data package — a file they import. Certificates, icon sets, terrain, map sources, and a .pref settings file.
2. The phone settings — sent when the app signs in to this system. Toolbar, units, team names, geofences, quick chat.

Only R2TAK uses the second one. ATAK never talks to this system at all — it talks to the TAK server. It only ever sees the package.

Who gets what

Enrolling somebody on ATAK or WinTAK

1. Make the .pref once. Set an ATAK device up the way you want it, then export its preferences from ATAK. That file is your template.
2. Upload it. Device setup → Files → "Settings file (.pref)".
3. Make a package for them. Set TAK app: ATAK, and check the .pref along with any icon sets and map sources.
4. Enroll them on that package — Single, Group or Bulk, all the same.
5. They get an email with ATAK's own setup steps and a package holding their certificates and files. They import it, and ATAK applies the settings.

TAK Aware, iTAK and CloudTAK

These have no settings channel at all. They do not read a .pref, and they do not sign in to this system. All we can give them is certificates and files — their users set the app up themselves.

That is not something to fix here; it is what those apps support. Worth knowing before promising anybody a consistent setup.

One caution about .pref files

A .pref can point a device at a different server. That is why R2TAK ignores them — a package can arrive from anywhere, and it is not checked the way the phone settings are.

For ATAK that risk is simply how ATAK has always worked. Just do not treat the two as equivalent: one is a file anybody could hand somebody, the other only ever comes from here.

People setting themselves up

So you do not have to track each person down. There is one public page — hand out the link to /setup on your console’s address — where somebody can help themselves without any login.

Lost their setup

Somebody already on your roster who lost their phone or their files types the email or mobile number you have for them. If it matches exactly one active person, it becomes a request you approve. Approving re-sends their setup to the contact already on their roster row — never to whatever they typed.

Nobody logs in

Responders have no password here — only administrators do. The proof it is really them is that the link only ever goes to the phone or email already on their roster. If it is not theirs, they never get it.

New people

Somebody not set up yet uses the same page to request access instead, which lands under Access requests for you to approve.

The roster

Everybody, and everything you can do to one person. On the Dashboard.

• New code — they lost their phone, or never enrolled.
• Package — move them onto a different setup.
• Permissions — what they can do in here.
• Reset TAK Password — type the new one yourself, or have one made.
• Disable — stop their access without deleting them.
• Remove — take them off the roster.

Taking somebody off

First, the one question that decides everything: is the person on your roster, or is it a leftover login on the TAK server that was never on your roster? That picks the screen. Everything else is one button.

Disable — they are coming back

Leave, suspension, a lost phone. On the Dashboard, find them and press Disable.

• They are signed out everywhere, straight away.
• Every device they carry stops working.
• Their record and history are kept.
• Letting them back in later does not bring their devices back — they enroll again with a new code.

Remove — they have gone

On the Dashboard, find them and press Remove. Read the box before you agree to it.

• Every device, code and saved package of theirs is destroyed.
• They cannot get back in without being added again.
• Their history stays with their details wiped. The record of what they did cannot be erased by anybody, including us.
• If they never finished setting up, nothing is kept at all and the console says so. Both answers are normal.

Their TAK account goes with them — automatically

Leaving the “also delete their TAK login” box checked on Remove does the whole thing: the console revokes their certificate and deletes their TAK account in the same motion. You do not visit Certificates, and you do not visit Unclaimed accounts. (Uncheck the box only in the rare case you want to keep the TAK login — say, a shared device staying in service.)

• If the same login is also on another agency’s roster, the console leaves it in place and tells you — it will not cut off the other agency.
• Deleting the TAK account is a provider-level action, so on Remove it happens for whoever already has that power; others still remove the person from the roster and the console names the login left behind.

Leftover logins nobody’s claimed

Accounts on the TAK server that were never on your roster — ones that came with an agency migrating in, or test logins from setting up — live under Server Status › Unclaimed accounts. Tick any number and press Delete selected: one confirmation, each certificate revoked and each account deleted. (The server’s own admin login is protected and refuses — that is deliberate.)

Teams

A team is a name you can page all at once. That is the whole job.

Teams live at the bottom of Send an activation, because paging is the only thing they are for. Make a team, add people to it from the dropdown, and it becomes something you can pick when you send.

Click a name to take somebody off. Worth doing when people move on — otherwise they keep getting called to incidents that are no longer theirs.

Packages

A package is what a kind of person gets set up with — SWAT, Patrol, Volunteer. You pick one when you enroll somebody instead of setting the same nine things again.

Agency default is the fallback for anyone with no package, and the base the others build on.

What adds, and what replaces

• Channels and files ADD to the agency default.
• Everything else REPLACES it — toolbar, hidden tools, units, coordinates.

The three states, on every setting

1. Switch off — we say nothing, the phone keeps what it has.
2. Switch on, nothing chosen — a deliberate empty. An empty toolbar is a real instruction.
3. Switch on, things chosen — exactly those.

Moving somebody between packages

Change the Package column on the roster. Their phone picks it up on its next check-in — no need to re-enroll them.

Files

The library the packages draw from. Upload once and it is available to every package.

• Icon set — a zip of map icons.
• Map source — an XML file describing a map layer.
• Terrain (DTED) — elevation data.
• Settings file (.pref) — Android and Windows only.

Everyone means it goes out with every enrollment whether a package names it or not. Unchecked, it goes only to the packages that ask for it.

Phone settings

Set on the agency default, or on a package to differ from it.

• Units — distance, altitude, speed, temperature. Display only.
• Toolbar — which tools are on the bar, in order. Around seven fit.
• Tools grid — the full page of tools behind the toolbar, in order.
• Hidden tools — off the bar and out of the menu, still in the phone's own settings.
• Quick chat — canned messages. The button text and what it sends are different on purpose.
• Geofences — alerting behavior, and how far out to warn.
• Toolbar colors — with a preview, because white icons on a light map look like missing tools.

Team names

What your people see instead of a color — Cyan is "Alpha", Green is "Medical". The color itself is fixed and shared with every other TAK app; only the word is yours. Agency-wide.

Who has picked it up

After you change a setting, this is how you know it landed. Three states:

• Current — they have what you would give them now.
• Stale — they have an older setup and will update on their next check-in.
• Unknown — we have never heard from that phone.

Calling people out

Send an activation. Say what is happening, pick who, send. Then watch the answers come in.

Who

Search finds both teams and people. Pick a team to page everybody on it; pick people to page just them. You can mix.

How it reaches them

1. App notification — right away.
2. Text — after two minutes, if they have not answered.
3. Phone call — after five minutes, if they still have not.

Somebody who answers stops climbing that ladder. Somebody with no mobile number only ever gets the first rung.

Who has answered

Live, under the send form. Responding, not responding, and who has said nothing at all — the third one being the group worth chasing.

Locate a phone

Text somebody a link. They tap it, and where they are shows up on the map — and keeps updating while their page stays open.

It is for people who are not set up on TAK: a caller who cannot say where they are, somebody reported missing, a victim on a live call. No app, no account, nothing to install. Any phone that can open a web page can do it.

It texts them straight away, without asking first

Everywhere else in this console that texts somebody who is not on your roster holds the message and waits for them to reply YES. This one cannot. Somebody hiding in a closet cannot reply and then wait for a second message.

That is why the screen asks why, and why what you type is written down before the text goes out. Use this when the situation is really that — not as a quicker way to ask where somebody is.

What you fill in

• Name on the map — what the marker is called. Something the room will recognize: “Caller, 118 Oak St”.
• Their mobile number.
• Shaded circle — optional, off unless you pick one. It draws a ring around the marker, which is the honest way to say “somewhere about here”. Indoors a phone fix can be tens of meters out, and a bare dot hides that. You choose the size, because how sure you are is a judgment about the call, not something we can work out.
• Link lasts — one, four, eight or twelve hours. Four to start with.
• Why — the reason, recorded before the text is sent.

What they get

A short text saying who is asking, then the link — who and why first, because an unexplained link asking for your location is exactly what a scam looks like.

The page says who asked and has one button. Their own phone then asks them to allow it, the way any map app does, so they are still choosing. They are told to keep the page open, and there is a Stop sharing button they can press whenever they want.

What you see

• A marker on the map that moves as they move, not a single pin.
• A second marker left where they first appeared, so you can see where they started as well as where they are heading.
• Running now — every live one, with how many positions have come in.
• Finished — the ones that stopped, were stopped, or ran out.

Stopping it

Three ways it ends: they press Stop sharing, you press Stop, or the clock runs out. Stopping from here kills the link at once — their page stops sending and tells them so.

Radio nets

Three screens, and they do different jobs.

• Standing Nets — the channels your agency has every day. Set up once, left alone.
• Comm Plans — a saved pattern of nets for a kind of incident. Stamp it out when that kind of thing happens.
• Live Nets — what is running right now, from a plan or built by hand. Packed away when the incident ends.

Starting an operation from a plan makes the nets and puts them on the right phones. Ending it removes exactly what it made and nothing an operator built by hand.

After-action review

What happened on one channel, between two times — markers, drawings, chat, and who moved where. For writing up a callout or a training run afterwards. Find it under Administration → After-action review.

How to run one

Pick the channel and the hours the callout ran — the quick buttons (Last 4 hours, Yesterday) fill the times for you — then press Show what happened. Tick Include movement to see who walked where.

The map beside it

Every marker shows on the map, shaped the way TAK shapes it: a blue circle is friendly, a red diamond hostile, a green square neutral, a yellow one unknown. Each person’s movement draws as a line in their own color. Tap a line in the list to find it on the map, or a dot on the map to find it in the list.

Playing it back

Press play to watch the callout unfold in order, or drag the slider to any moment. The marks along the slider are when things happened — blue ones are chat — so you can jump straight to the action. The chat window fills as the messages arrive, like a message thread.

Channels

A channel is a group on the radio. Being in one is what decides whose map markers and messages somebody sees, and who sees theirs. Everything else on a phone is settings; this is the part that decides who they are working with.

The three ways to be in one

The same three words, arrows and colors Sentinel uses, so somebody who administers both does not have to translate.

• Both ↔ — they see the channel and the channel sees them. This is what most people want.
• Write ← — the channel sees them, they do not see it. Useful for somebody whose position you want on the map without filling their screen.
• Read → — they see the channel and it does not see them. Useful for a watch desk.

The description on each channel is ours, not the server’s — the server has nowhere to keep one. It is there so the next person to look knows what CCSO-TAC1 is actually for.

Changing somebody’s channels replaces the whole list rather than adding to it, so the screen always shows you every channel they will end up with. Taking away their last channel is refused: that leaves somebody connected but deaf and mute, which looks like a working account and is not. Use Remove if you mean to take their access away.

Server Downloads

Icon sets, map overlays, saved markers — anything you want people to be able to fetch on their own. It is a zip file, up to 50 MB.

Everyone on the server can see it

Everyone on this server will be able to see it. The TAK server decides who can see a file from the account this console signs in with, and there is no setting to narrow it to one channel or one agency. So a file you put here is visible to every channel on the server, including other agencies’ channels. That is why only a Global Admin can add or remove one, and why the screen tells you which channels it landed in as soon as it is done.

Removing files

Check the boxes and press Remove selected. One thing to know before you do:

There is no undo. A phone that already downloaded a file keeps its copy; it just cannot fetch it again.

Rows you did not put there

Some rows say left over from a shared folder. The TAK server takes a snapshot whenever a Data Sync folder is made, and it leaves that snapshot behind after the folder is removed. They are real files taking real space and they are safe to remove. They are labeled rather than hidden so nobody spends an afternoon wondering where a file they never uploaded came from.

Data Sync

A shared folder that also carries live map markers. People subscribe to one, and everything in it — files, markers, notes — changes on their screen as it changes. The closest everyday comparison is a shared drive that also holds the map.

Good for one callout, one exercise, or one standing job that several agencies work together.

Pick the channel carefully

The name cannot change later

The name becomes the folder’s address on the server, so it is fixed once it is made and it cannot contain spaces. Use dashes or underscores — Warrant-Service-0214 — and put the plain wording in the description, where it can say anything you like.

Putting files in it

Each folder has an Add file button on its row. Pick a file and it goes straight in, and everybody subscribed to that folder gets it. Icon sets, map source packs and data packages all work — a Sentinel download with no file extension is fine, pick it exactly as it downloaded.

Removing one

Everything in the folder goes with it, and everybody subscribed to it loses it. There is no undo. A snapshot stays behind in Server Downloads, which you can remove separately.

Who is on the server

Three screens that answer three different questions. They look similar and they are not.

Certificates

Which devices hold a certificate for your TAK server. A certificate belongs to a device, not a person — one login can hold several, one per handset. Somebody with two certificates usually has an old phone still on the list.

Connected now

Who is on the server this minute. This is deliberately not joined to your roster: a device can connect with no account of yours behind it, and those are exactly the rows worth looking at.

Whole server

Everyone the TAK server knows about, across every agency on it — not just your roster. Use it to find people who had a TAK username before this system existed, and adopt them onto your roster rather than making a duplicate.

How access is controlled

The short version, for when your IT or legal people ask. Nothing here is aspirational — it is what the system does today, and it says where it falls short.

Nobody lets themselves in

An administrator adds a named person. The system makes that person their own account on the TAK server and issues their own certificate, in their name, at that moment. There is no shared certificate and no pool of spares.

Their setup reaches them on a link that expires and stops working after a few uses — not as a file passed around.

You can see who is on the server

Every connection is a named identity, because everybody carries their own certificate. Each account also has its own password, handed to that one person once so their app can collect its certificate. It is never shared and never reused across devices. What there is not is a shared login passed around a team.

You can take access away at four sizes

• One session — sign somebody out of one place
• One device — switch off a single phone, leaving their others working
• One certificate — cut a device off the TAK server
• The person — remove them entirely

Cutting a certificate off is not instant. The TAK server applies it when it next reads its revocation list. For something urgent, revoke and then confirm it took effect.

What gets written down

Thirty-eight kinds of action are recorded — every enrollment, every account created or removed, every certificate issued or revoked, every permission and channel change. Each entry seals the one before it, so altering history is detectable rather than merely discouraged.

If somebody replies STOP to a text

They stop getting setup links, file links and administrative texts. They still get called out.

That is deliberate: somebody can stop the paperwork without stopping the emergency. Their phone company may still block the message at their end, which shows here as a delivery failure.

Where we fall short today

Said plainly, because you may be asked and should not be surprised:

• A certificate is a file. Nothing stops somebody copying their own to a second device. You can see their devices and switch one off; the system does not prevent the copy. That is true of every TAK deployment we know of.
• The tamper check catches changed entries and entries removed from the middle. It does not yet catch entries deleted from the end.
• Two-step sign-in works, but each administrator turns it on for themselves by registering a passkey. There is no setting that requires it of everybody.

Encryption and security controls

For the person at an agency whose job is to find the gap. Everything here was measured, or read from the running configuration, on 2 September 2026. Where something was not, it says so.

In transit

TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are refused on every endpoint. The two TAK server ports carrying responder traffic (8089) and administrative traffic (8443) accept TLS 1.3 only and negotiate AES-256-GCM. The WebTAK port (8446) and this console (443) also accept TLS 1.2, and on 1.2 negotiate ECDHE with AES-256-GCM: forward secret and authenticated. NULL and anonymous cipher suites were offered and refused.

Phones and CloudTAK identify themselves to the TAK server with an x509 client certificate issued per person by the deployment's own certificate authority. The server certificate names the host by DNS only, so a client that verifies certificates must connect by hostname.

The algorithms

• SHA-256 for enrollment codes, link tokens, refresh tokens and the audit chain
• AES-256-GCM for stored second-factor seeds, key held outside the database
• AES-256-CBC with PBKDF2 for nightly backups; the job refuses to run unencrypted
• scrypt for console operator passwords - a deliberate choice against offline attack, and the one algorithm here that is not FIPS approved

At rest

• Our database and CloudTAK's are both managed PostgreSQL, encrypted under a customer-managed KMS key, not publicly reachable. Ours keeps 7 days of backups; CloudTAK's keeps 1.
• Passwords, refresh tokens, enrollment codes and link tokens are stored only as hashes.
• Application secrets live in a root-readable file on the server, outside the code, and credential-bearing links are stripped from logs before they are written.

What we do not claim

• Revocation is not enforced on the federation link. The hub has OCSP off; a revoked federation certificate keeps working until it expires. Turning it on where the hub lives would need an internal responder, because that network has no outbound internet.
• The federation link permits 128-bit and non-Suite-B ciphers. Two hub settings, and they contradict the Federation Security Plan.
• The setup link's contents are stored readable. The link token is hashed; the enrollment code beside it is not. A leaked database backup would expose unexpired, unused codes.
• Second factor cannot be required of everybody. It works per person; there is no deployment-wide switch.
• Audit truncation is not detected. Changed or removed-from-the-middle entries are; entries cut from the end are not.
• The TAK server's own disk is not asserted encrypted. It holds the certificate authority. Not read back from the platform yet.
• What CloudTAK stores outside its database is not characterized, and its connection to the TAK server uses an administrative certificate.

FIPS

We do not claim FIPS 140-2 or 140-3 validation, and no part of the system runs in FIPS mode - the TAK server configuration carries no FIPS directive. FIPS validates cryptographic modules, not products, so it is not something R2TAK applies for; it is something a deployment is built from. The algorithms above are FIPS approved with the single exception named. Where validation is a procurement requirement, the path is GovCloud FIPS endpoints, the TAK server's FIPS mode, swapping scrypt for PBKDF2, and fixing the two federation settings. That is scope, not status.

Where the software comes from

R2TAK runs TAK Server obtained from the U.S. government's TAK Product Center under their distribution agreement - the same server software deployed across defense and public safety, not a reimplementation or a fork. Our own cryptography is limited to the hashing and storage listed above; the certificate authority and the transport are the government product's.

What changed recently

Newest first. Only things you would notice.

31 August 2026

• Video plays in the console. It never had. Four separate faults were stacked on each other, the outermost being a security rule that stopped the console loading its own video player — so the picture was blocked with nothing anywhere reporting a problem.
• Any camera plays now, not only ones the browser already understands. Cameras sending a format browsers cannot read are converted automatically, and only while somebody is watching.
• Video tiles resize and drag, with buttons rather than a corner you had to know about.
• Spreadsheet imports forgive capitals. A channel, team color or position typed in the wrong case is corrected to the server's spelling instead of being silently dropped. Anything matching nothing is flagged on the row rather than passing quietly.
• A busy moment no longer looks like being signed out. The console used to report a rate limit as “invalid access token” and give up.

Late August 2026

• Home screen — one place that says what needs attention.
• Locate a phone, and after-action review with a timeline and map.
• Work-account sign-in, and people can request access themselves.
• Callsigns must be unique — duplicates used to knock each other off the server with no message.

When something looks wrong

A change has not reached a phone

Check Who has picked it up. A phone updates when the app checks in, not the moment you press Save.

A code will not work

• Capitals and the hyphen do not matter. abcd efgh is fine.
• A code works once. Press New code for another.
• If that phone is already signed in, sign out on it first.

The channel list is empty or out of date

That list comes from the TAK server. If it did not answer, the screen says so rather than pretending — the last good answer is shown and marked.

Somebody did not get paged

Look at Sent. Every attempt is recorded with what happened. No mobile number means app notification only.

Who did what

Agency history. Every change, who made it, and to whom. It can be checked for tampering from that screen.

A screen says it could not read the TAK server

That is a different thing from the server being empty, and no screen here draws an empty table to mean it. Channels, Server files, Data Sync and Certificates all say so plainly instead. The usual cause is the TAK server being restarted or unreachable for a moment; opening the screen again is the first thing to try.

The channel list will not fill in

The console reads the channel list once when you sign in. If the server did not answer at that moment, some pickers stay empty for the rest of the session. Reload the page and it asks again.

A file is still listed after removing it

The screen says so rather than telling you it worked, because the TAK server reports a removal as done whether or not it did anything. Try once more. If it stays, the server needs looking at — nothing here can force it.

A button is missing that you expected

Adding or removing anything on the TAK server itself — files, shared folders, agencies — takes an operator who covers the whole deployment, not one agency. Those controls are not drawn at all for anybody else rather than shown and then refused. If you should have them and do not, somebody has to grant it from the server.

Not built yet

Said plainly, so nobody hunts for a button that is not there.

• Aircraft and vessel feeds — the tools exist on the phone and there is nowhere to put the account details yet.
• Per-package team names — team names are agency-wide for now.
• Taking push to talk back — it goes to everyone, and hiding the tool is how you take it off a toolbar.
• Downloading a file off the TAK server — you can upload one and remove one, but not fetch a copy back to your computer. The phones still get these files normally.
• Files bigger than 50 MB on the TAK server — map tile packs run to hundreds of megabytes and need a different way of sending them.
• Changing the video password from a screen — the video server forgets it on restart, so it is an operator command on the box instead of a button that would quietly undo itself.