Law Enforcement Solved Unified Situational Awareness with TAK

Unified Situational Awareness
Many applications exist which take advantage of smartphones for BFT, but very few of them can communicate with each other. The lack of interoperability between disparate tools presently allows for scenarios where dangerous blue on blue or blue on green contact could occur. By using a central hub (in this case TAK Server), all SA data has a single focal point ensuring uniformity.
FBI Hosted Resources
By hosting the TAK Server service and providing federal, state and local public safety agencies with free access to this suite of interoperable COP products, the FBI is removing the cost of entry for use of a powerful SA toolkit. With no cost of entry; mission planning, situational awareness, and real time interoperability between all levels of first responders is achievable resulting in superior officer safety, as well as enhanced command, control, and communications. Ultimately, this ensures a safer and better response to critical events.
Contact the FBI TAK program at takrequest@leo.gov for more information.
As of 10/01/2021, all non-US requests for FBI hosting must be coordinated with the local legal attaché office.


DHS TAK Program
Over the past five years, DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has successfully leveraged this system to support federal agency response during natural disasters and coordinated operations. TAK clients use the native communications built into the hardware (e.g. cellular, wi-fi, etc.) to pass data across an existing network to the TAK server (and onto other devices with TAK clients). ATAK supports a "plug-in" architecture, which allows non-native communications provided by external communications devices (e.g. SATCOM, MANET, etc.), to interface with ATAK and pass data across the networks created by those external communication devices. This allows ATAK to be used with technologies which solve many of the current "comms" issues encountered by end users.