About / Tampa, FL
About Natak Mesh
We build Nucleus, a portable mesh radio for teams that run ATAK without a network. We're in Tampa, Florida.
We built it because the options we used were either too slow for ATAK or too much work to set up. Here's how we got from those to the Nucleus.
01How it started
What we tried first
Rocket M5 MANET builds
We started with the Rocket M5 MANET builds from the team at teamawarenesskit.org. We used them for a while. They worked, but we wanted something simpler to set up and carry.
Meshtastic
Next we tried Meshtastic. The range is great, but the throughput is far too low for what ATAK does: live positions for a whole team, voice, pictures and files.
WiFi HaLow
Then we spent most of a year on a WiFi HaLow build. The low-power HaLow radios we could buy didn't reach far enough further than 2.4 GHz to make up for their much lower throughput. The 2.4 GHz mesh remains the primary link. HaLow is offered as an optional module for an additional IP link in a separate band.
A 2.4 GHz WiFi mesh with LoRa on the side
So we built a 2.4 GHz WiFi mesh focused on throughput and reliability, and added a LoRa radio for the long, slow links. ATAK runs on the mesh at full rate, and a bridge on each node sends position and chat over LoRa when someone walks out of WiFi range. That's the Nucleus.
02How it's built
Off-the-shelf parts, open software
We keep the cost down with off-the-shelf consumer parts: a Raspberry Pi 4, WiFi and LoRa radios, RP-SMA antennas, and a USB power bank for the battery. The enclosure is 3D-printed in PCTG.
The software is V3 OS, our own build on Debian 13. It's open source under the MIT licence, and it sits on open projects: Meshtastic for LoRa, Reticulum for encrypted messaging, Babel for mesh routing. Every node updates itself from our GitHub repository, from the web UI.
Use the parts you need. ATAK over the mesh, Meshtastic with plain Meshtastic radios, Reticulum with Sideband or MeshChat. None of them lock you to us.
03Contact