Live traffic drawn over the base map you are already using, and kept refreshing
while the map sits still.
ATAK can already display an online map source, and a map source can ask to be
refreshed on a timer — but that refresh only happens while the map is being
drawn. A device sitting on a dash mount or a desk is not drawing anything, so
the traffic quietly goes stale, and panning the map to check is exactly what
makes it look fine again. A layered source, the one arrangement that puts
traffic over your own imagery or topo, carries no refresh interval at all.
This plugin owns its own overlay layer and drives the refresh itself.
What it does
- Traffic above your chosen base map, which stays readable underneath — imagery,
topo or vector. - Refreshes on a wall clock while the map is untouched, at an interval you pick
from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. - Holds while the screen is off — no tiles are requested, so it costs no battery
or data while nobody is looking — and refreshes on wake, typically within about
three seconds of unlocking. - Manual refresh that takes effect at once rather than at the next interval.
- A status line reporting when tiles genuinely last arrived, so a stalled network
shows as a timestamp that stops moving rather than one that keeps ticking over
a frozen picture.
Downloads
Plugin builds are tied to the ATAK release they were built for. Pick the one
matching your ATAK-CIV version, sideload it, then load it in ATAK's Plugins
manager. A mismatched build will not load.
| ATAK-CIV | File |
|---|---|
| 5.6 | ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.2--5.6.0-civ-release.apk |
| 5.7 | ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.2--5.7.0-civ-release.apk |
| 5.8 | ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.2--5.8.0-civ-release.apk |
All three APKs are built and signed by the TAK Product Center from the submitted
source. The 5.7 and 5.8 builds have been run on hardware; the 5.6 build has not
— it is the same 0.2 source built for the 5.6 API, but no test device here runs
ATAK 5.6. If you are on 5.6, please report anything that misbehaves.
User guide with screenshots: https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md
Traffic is live data and has no useful offline mode — cached tiles are, by
definition, old traffic. The overlay makes outbound HTTPS requests only while it
is on and the screen is awake; it never talks to the TAK server and generates no
CoT.