CicadaTAK

CicadaTAK turns your phone into a live tactical display for places with no cell service and no internet — backcountry, disaster response, large properties, search grids, event perimeters.

It is the companion app for CicadaTAK mesh nodes: 900 MHz radio gateways you build yourself from a fully documented hardware recipe (parts list and instructions at cicadatak.com). Nodes form a self-healing mesh that reaches over a mile per hop and relays through every teammate, so coverage grows as the team spreads out. Your phone joins a node's WiFi and the radios do the rest.

WORKS WITH ATAK AND iTAK • Nodes speak Cursor-on-Target in both directions — positions, chat and markers pass between this app and ATAK or iTAK devices on the same node • No TAK server, no data plan, no setup beyond joining the node's WiFi • Run this app, run ATAK, or run both side by side on one team

LIVE TEAM MAP • Teammates update live with callsigns, colors and breadcrumb trails • A position that stops being current turns grey and shows its age instead of vanishing, so you always know how old the picture is • Offline maps — download aerial, topo and street layers onto the node and use them with zero internet • Drop markers, draw geofence zones, measure distance and bearing, save routes

ENCRYPTED TEAM CHAT • End-to-end encrypted with your team passphrase — the key never leaves your team • Share photos from camera or gallery, carried over the radio, never through a server • Delivery receipts, canned quick replies, and roll call for fast accountability

PUSH-TO-TALK VOICE • Live streaming PTT to the whole team — real voice traffic, not recorded clips • Tuned to stay intelligible on marginal links

LONG-RANGE LoRa BRIDGE • Nodes fitted with LoRa hardware bridge to Meshtastic radios, carrying positions and text far beyond the main mesh • Three privacy modes, from open interoperability to fully dark

RUN THE NETWORK FROM YOUR POCKET • Set up a new node from the app — no laptop, no terminal • Live topology graph of every radio link, colored by measured throughput • Node list with signal, battery and hardware status; one-tap ping for round-trip time • Trade speed for range across the whole team at once, with automatic revert if a node doesn't come back • Update node firmware over the air

YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS • No accounts, no sign-up, no cloud, no analytics • Everything travels phone to your own radio to your teammates' phones • There is no server in the path, so there is nothing for us to see

IMPORTANT • Full functionality requires CicadaTAK node hardware. Without a node the app runs in Standalone Mode: your own GPS on the map, offline map browsing, and every screen navigable — mesh chat, PTT and team positions activate when you connect to a node. • Nodes operate in the 902–928 MHz license-free ISM band on the United States channel plan, which is also licence-exempt in Canada and Mexico. No radio license required. • Build your nodes at cicadatak.com — an open, fully documented hardware build on an open-source radio and mesh foundation.