Map Depot v1.16

Features in full

Seven kinds of data, each installed into the directory ATAK already scans, so nothing has to be imported by hand afterwards:

* Elevation. DTED2 by state or province. Every cell is verified against a SHA-256 digest before it is installed, because a truncated .dt2 reads as valid to ATAK and silently corrupts line of sight and viewshed. Downloads resume, and a region already partly present fetches only what is missing.

* Streaming base maps. MOBAC map source XML and streaming vector tile configs -- satellite, street, topographic, nautical, and transparent overlays such as Google roads and labels, USGS contours, BLM roads and trails, FEMA flood hazard zones, NEXRAD radar and current fire perimeters, sectioned by kind with roads and points of interest first. An overlay installs into ATAK's grg folder, where ATAK draws it over the base map and over any disaster aerial, and the row carries a Hide/Show switch; a base map installs into the map source folder, where it is one more map to pick.

* Disaster aerials. Post-event imagery from three sources in one list, events of this year and last: NOAA's National Geodetic Survey flights (15-30 cm), the Civil Air Patrol's flights for FEMA served by FEMA's GeoPlatform (down to 9 cm), and Maxar Open Data satellite releases served by Esri's Living Atlas (30 cm, CC BY-NC, before and after, cloud cover on the row). Everything an agency publishes is listed, not graded. One overlay per flight. Each flight can be added as a streaming overlay or downloaded as an offline copy, an MBTiles pack the depot builds from the agency's own tiles or image service at the flight's full detail, or a step coarser to stay under about 500 MB, which draws with no signal. The catalog is rebuilt nightly from each agency's own index, so flights added during a storm appear the next day and their offline copies the morning after. Outlines show where each flight on the phone is.

* Offline public land vector tiles. US Forest Service vector basemap packages, one per national forest or grassland, fetched directly from ArcGIS Online.

* Offline public land PDFs. The Forest Service's printed map sheets as georeferenced PDFs, which install as image overlays and draw over whatever base map is already in use: ranger district and forest visitor maps, the nine regional maps, the 1:100,000 series and the 1:24,000 FSTopo quads. The two large series are listed nearest the map first, with distance and direction on every row, because nobody knows the name of their quad.

* Incident maps. The operational products a going fire's GIS shop posts to the NIFC archive -- ops, division, air operations, transport, briefing and IR -- browsed by geographic area and fire. Filenames written for a desktop file browser are renamed for a phone screen, keyed to the operational period rather than the plot time, with the original shown underneath.

* Drone IR maps. The same, for infrared flown by uncrewed aircraft and posted to the UAS Wildland Fire Consortium. Flight logs and geodatabases are left out; only georeferenced maps and KMZ overlays are offered.

* Beacon Box maps. FlameMapper's neighborhood pre-plans for the Santa Monica Mountains communities and a few others -- a base map, an aerial, a fire-science sheet and a structure-vulnerability sheet per neighborhood, as GeoPDFs -- browsed by area and neighborhood the way the incident archives are. Their own site cannot be reached from a phone, so they are mirrored on the depot with the author's permission. Maps by FlameMapper.

Any folder in either archive can be pinned to the top of the list, so a crew assigned to a fire reaches it in one tap rather than four.

The catalog is fetched at runtime and saved on the phone, so a device that has been to the depot once still shows what it holds when there is no signal. The three incident archives are read live, since what they hold changes through the day; with no signal their list is the maps already on the phone and the pinned fires.

Equipment required

An Android device running ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.x, and enough free storage for whatever is downloaded. The plugin checks free space before starting and refuses rather than filling the device.

Works with

No peripherals. No GPS, radio, camera or Bluetooth use.

Network and security

Outbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) only. The plugin opens no listening ports and accepts no inbound connections.

Hosts contacted

* The depot itself, which is a preference and not a fixed address. It serves the catalog, the map source files and the elevation cells. It ships pointing at a Cloudflare R2 bucket. * www.arcgis.com and tiles.arcgis.com, for Forest Service basemap packages, which are fetched from their publisher rather than mirrored. * data.fs.usda.gov, for Forest Service map sheets of every series. * ftp.wildfire.gov, for NIFC incident maps. Public, no account. * uaswfc.org, for UAS Wildland Fire Consortium drone products. Public, no account. Both are preferences rather than fixed addresses, and both are rejected if not HTTPS.

Installing a map source does not itself contact that source's server; ATAK does, when the operator turns the layer on. Which servers those are is visible in the source list before anything is installed.

Non-HTTPS depot addresses are rejected.

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