Where ATAK ends, Compass begins. The sovereign common operating picture.
Every allied unit from a border patrol squad to a maritime boarding team needs the same three things: a shared map, secure voice, and a message that gets through even when the network is on fire. ATAK solves that problem well — on American terms, with American jurisdiction, American export controls, and American telemetry. Compass solves it on yours. Built in Sofia. Bonded across every radio you have. Wrapped in a traffic-analysis-resistant overlay. Running when the cloud is a smoking hole and the cellular network is Russian.
The picture you can't afford to lose, running on someone else's terms.
Every modern European defence, interior, and civil-protection force has reached the same uncomfortable realisation simultaneously: the battlespace picture is a dependency — and it is not ours. Four stress-lines are now visible at once.
Sovereignty drift on the tactical edge.
ATAK runs under US DoD stewardship. Export is ITAR- and EAR-controlled. The application speaks to infrastructure that can be turned off, audited, or silently updated from a jurisdiction that is not ours. Allied forces accept the trade because there is nothing else. There should be something else.
Jammed borders and contested spectrum.
The eastern flank of NATO now operates continuously under Russian GNSS denial and directional jamming. Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian border units regularly lose cellular, GPS, and sometimes UHF for hours at a time. A COP that assumes IP-over-LTE is not a COP.
Passive traffic-analysis adversaries.
A capable signals intelligence apparatus does not need to break your cipher. It needs to observe who speaks to whom, when, and how much. Cable-tapping on the Baltic seabed, fibre-monitoring at IX-es, cooperative carriers — the flows are visible long before the payload is readable. Encryption alone is not enough.
A fragmented sensor & portfolio landscape.
A Bulgarian border brigade might field Silvus radios on the vehicle, TETRA handhelds on the person, Iridium on the command post, Starlink on the container, Meshtastic on the recon team — and four different apps to read them. Correlation happens in a staff officer's head. That is not a C2 system; it is an organizational hazard.
A sovereign tactical COP, bonded across every radio, dark on the wire.
Three non-negotiable properties. Pick any two from a competitor. Compass ships all three.
Radio-agnostic transport.
HF for beyond-line-of-sight without satellites. VHF and UHF for legacy-handset interop. MANET for high-bandwidth vehicle mesh. SATCOM when you have sky. LoRa when you have nothing. mmWave when you have a forward base. All of them, bonded through Nexus Atlas, surfaced to the user as one tunnel.
- 9 distinct RF layers, first-class
- Link-aware scheduler; sub-second failover
- Legacy radio adapters via audio + PTT lines
Traffic-analysis resistant by default.
Stealth-Net is the onion-style overlay for when your egress crosses hostile fibre. Thirty real shards, thirty decoys, multi-jurisdictional relays, fixed padding, randomised jitter, and plausible deniability for who is talking to whom. Opt-in per session. Invisible to the operator.
- Onion routing with per-hop keys
- Decoy shards to decoy destinations
- Zero-knowledge mailbox store-and-forward
Sovereign by construction.
Designed, built, and held in the European Union. No US export licence in the critical path. No opaque US-controlled update channel. Source escrow available to sovereign customers. Post-quantum hybrid crypto aligned with NIST FIPS 203. No telemetry. No phone-home. Air-gap mode is a first-class deployment, not a workaround.
- Bulgarian jurisdiction · EU data residency
- GDPR-clean by design · zero default telemetry
- Source escrow · audit-ready build pipeline
HF to mmWave. Nine radio layers. One bonded tunnel.
Compass treats each RF layer as a transport, not a feature. The link-scheduler watches every layer continuously, measures latency, jitter, loss and residual bandwidth, and steers traffic to wherever the numbers are least bad. The operator sees one connected icon. The truth underneath is a live contest between nine physical realities.
Why HF is not a museum piece.
3–30 MHzNear-vertical-incidence skywave carries a voice and a 300-byte situation report across 800 km with no satellite, no cell tower, no relay — just an ionosphere and a long-wire antenna. Compass runs Codec2 @ 700 bps for voice and a fragmented, FEC-protected data profile for text. HF is the last thing to die when everything else does.
Legacy handhelds still count.
VHF / UHFMost interior ministries, border guards and civil-protection units own warehouses of P25, DMR and TETRA radios they are not scrapping before 2035. Compass plugs into them via audio-over-PTT adapter boxes and surfaces them as logical transports — unit markers, chat and short reports ride through legacy iron with no hardware replacement cycle.
LoRa is the quiet superpower.
Meshtastic-nativeSub-GHz LoRa meshes carry ~100 bytes across tens of kilometres on a watch battery. First-class Meshtastic integration means a squad without radios, without towers, without permission still has the map. Position reports, casevac triggers and one-line messages propagate across a continent for the price of a dev-board.
Thirty real shards. Thirty decoys. Multi-jurisdictional. Not inferable.
Stealth-Net is the Compass answer to passive global adversaries — the cable-tapper, the cooperative-carrier, the IX-sniffer, the backbone-aggregator. It is an onion-style overlay network where every message is fragmented, padded, decoyed, and scattered across a multi-jurisdictional mesh of relays. A global observer sees flows to many destinations from many sources, of uniform size and timing, with no inferable pair, no inferable volume, no inferable schedule.
The seven steps of a Compass message.
What a passive adversary sees.
Attacker view- Many → many traffic at a fixed packet size and jittered cadence.
- Correlations are destroyed by independent shard paths across jurisdictions.
- Decoys create plausible traffic to parties who never receive a real message.
- No cleartext envelope. No consistent source/dest pair. No volume signal.
What costs.
Trade-offs- +150 – 600 ms median latency vs. direct TLS.
- 2 × bandwidth (30 real + 30 decoy shards).
- Relay nodes cost something to run. Compass operates a default set; sovereign customers run their own.
- Opt-in. Direct mode is always available for low-sensitivity or air-gap deployments.
What an active adversary cannot do.
Resilience- Seizing one relay leaks no plaintext and no path metadata — the relay only saw one hop.
- Sybil decoys are rate-limited by proof-of-work and operator attestation.
- Delaying shards widens jitter; delivery degrades gracefully, does not fail.
- Blocking a jurisdiction shifts routing weight; the picture survives.
Seven layers. One runtime. Open at every boundary.
Compass is a layered system. Each layer has a single responsibility and a replaceable implementation. Apps depend on the runtime, the runtime depends on Stealth-Net, Stealth-Net depends on Nexus Atlas multi-path, Nexus Atlas depends on the radio abstraction, the radio abstraction depends on physical iron. You can swap any layer for a sovereign equivalent without touching the layers above or below.
Replaceable at every boundary.
Every interface between layers is a versioned protocol, not an internal API. A sovereign customer can build its own Stealth-Net relay software, its own radio driver, its own app, and plug it into a Compass deployment — provided the protocol is honoured. We publish protocol specs before we publish products.
Deployable from air-gap to Starlink.
Compass has three canonical deployment modes, all first-class. Air-gap runs inside a compound on LoRa / WiFi / MANET with no outside link. Sovereign cloud runs on customer-operated relays and mailboxes. Overlay mode borrows public internet transport and puts Stealth-Net on top. Customers mix and match per unit.
Text, voice, file, receipt. Offline or over HF.
Compass messaging is not bolted onto the COP — it is the primary operator interface under stress. When the network collapses to a 700-bit-per-second HF channel, text still moves. When the HF link collapses to zero, a message parks in a zero-knowledge mailbox and arrives when the recipient next breathes.
Point-to-point, forward-secure.
Two operators, one ratchet. Each message has its own key. Compromise of a device does not retroactively leak prior traffic. Messages encrypt to the recipient's long-term key; decrypt never leaves the endpoint.
- Noise-IK double ratchet
- Out-of-band key verification (QR / short code)
- Device revocation ≤ 30 s network-wide
Conferences with admin control.
Multi-party chats up to 256 members per group, with admin-controlled membership, forward-secrecy after a member leaves, and a tamper-evident membership log. Build a mission net on the fly, tear it down when the mission ends.
- Sender-keys with tree rekeying
- Admin add / remove with global rekey
- Message history optional — per group policy
Codec2 on HF. Opus on IP.
Push-to-talk across every transport. Codec2 @ 700 bps keeps a voice call up over an HF data channel. Opus @ 8 – 32 kbps on IP delivers clean audio on LTE or MANET. Both ends negotiate the lowest-common-denominator automatically.
- Codec2 · 700 – 3200 bps (HF ready)
- Opus · 8 – 32 kbps (IP / Ka / WiFi)
- PTT latency ≤ 240 ms end-to-end on MANET
Maps, imagery, orders. Resumable.
Fragmented chunk-addressable transfer. Every chunk is integrity-checked, erasure-coded, and can resume from any peer who already has it. A map tile pushed to a battalion propagates across the mesh; nobody downloads it twice.
- Content-addressed chunks (BLAKE3)
- Peer-assisted fetch / mesh-propagation
- Up to 4 GB single-object; unlimited by manifest
Cryptographic delivery and read.
A receipt is signed by the recipient's device key — not by a middlebox, not by the mailbox, not by the relay. "Read" means read. Unforgeable on either side. Visible as a tick on the operator UI, auditable as a line in the command log.
- Ed25519 signed receipts
- Delivered · Read · Acknowledged
- Attached to the command log with timestamp proof
Zero-knowledge mailbox.
When the recipient is offline, ciphertext shards park on a distributed mailbox set. The servers hold blinded tokens, not identities. They cannot read the message, cannot identify the recipient, cannot link messages to each other. On reconnect, the recipient pulls, acks, and the servers delete.
- Blinded recipient tokens (OPAQUE-class)
- TTL ≤ 14 days · server-side auto-purge
- Encrypted-at-rest on disk · auditable purge log
Phone + tablet + laptop + MDT.
One account, as many devices as the operator needs. A member's phone, tablet, vehicle terminal, and wearable all share ratchet state via the account root key. Add or revoke a device in one tap; the rest of the net learns within seconds.
- Account-key signed device certs
- Seamless PTT hand-off between devices
- Lost-device revocation from any other device
Speaks Cursor-on-Target natively.
CoT frames move across Compass as a native message type. Existing CoT-speaking ATAK and WinTAK plug-ins, sensors, and sims can publish into a Compass net with a thin bridge — no rewrite. Allied interop is a configuration setting, not a migration project.
- CoT 2.0 ingest & emit
- MIL-STD-2525 symbology
- Optional TAK-Server bridge mode
Short reports over skywave.
A dedicated low-bitrate profile carries position, status, casevac and short free-text across an HF link. FEC, ARQ, and ionospheric path prediction keep the rate honest. Think text message, not video call — but across 800 km of nothing.
- 75 – 2400 bps, adaptive
- Ionogram-fed path prediction
- Works with legacy HF modems via audio-line adapter
Map. Units. Routes. Sensors. Drones. Casualties.
The map is the product. Everything else — chat, voice, file transfer, receipts — orbits it. Compass ships a ruggedized, offline-first COP with the feature vocabulary a seasoned ATAK operator knows by muscle memory, plus a sensor-ingestion surface that accepts the entire Nexus Atlas portfolio out of the box.
Unit markers, waypoints, geofences.
Real-time blue-force tracking with configurable symbology (MIL-STD-2525 and a sane civil set). Shared waypoints, routes, corridors, exclusion zones, geofenced alerts. Edit on one device, see it on every device within a ratchet-round-trip.
ISR feed ingest.
Drone video and sensor feeds, including our own Blackbird counter-ISR platform, stream directly to the map. Geotag, ident, and playback in-app. Low-bandwidth preview mode falls back to thumbnails at 1 fps over HF-free links.
Pre-filled templates, instant dispatch.
One-tap nine-line casevac with pickup grid auto-populated from the device GPS, casualty state pickers, frequency & call-sign, security at pickup site. Routes straight to the medic and the watch. Acknowledgement is a cryptographic receipt.
Friend, foe, unknown, suspected.
Position reports from every connected device every 15 – 120 seconds (policy-configured). Track friendly units, named known-hostile tracks, and unknown contacts with a confidence score. IFF handshake for nearby friendlies over MANET.
Draw, share, acknowledge.
Free-hand annotation, KMZ imports, NGA pattern-of-life overlays, event timelines. Everything you mark is a first-class object — owned, timestamped, signed, and ack-able by receivers. Operator accountability by default.
Pre-staged by region.
Map packs download ahead of mission. Raster, vector, elevation, imagery — gigabytes of pre-staged tiles. In the field, no network is needed to pan, zoom, plan, or navigate. Packs are content-addressed; updates delta-patch.
The whole portfolio as feeds.
Backtrack co-travel detections, Bastion IMSI-catcher alerts, Phantom decoy-swarm health, Blackbird track data, Meshtastic pings, EverywhereHub IoT — all arrive as typed events on the same map. Correlation is a query, not a briefing.
Triggered by presence, path, or silence.
Define a polygon. Define a rule: "alert if any non-friendly enters", "alert if any friendly exits", "alert if there is no friendly inside for 20 minutes". Alarms propagate as prioritised messages — survive outage, ack on reconnect.
Tamper-evident record of the mission.
Every map edit, message, receipt and ack is written to a hash-chained log. Exportable at mission end for after-action review, legal defence, or audit. The log is the source of truth; the map is a projection.
Short-range cryptographic handshake.
Two Compass devices within MANET range exchange a short-lived handshake over a dedicated IFF slot. The map marks them as verified friendly, separately from reported-friendly. A hostile actor with a captured radio cannot fake it without the account key.
Noise IK + ML-KEM-768. Post-quantum hybrid. Live.
Every Compass session begins with a hybrid handshake. Classical Curve25519 and post-quantum ML-KEM-768 both contribute to the session key. An adversary must break both to read traffic — no "harvest now, decrypt later" window when quantum capability arrives.
Why hybrid, not pure PQ.
Pure post-quantum ciphers are young. They have been studied for a decade, not three. A cryptographic mistake in ML-KEM would be catastrophic. Pure classical is vulnerable the day a capable quantum machine ships. Hybrid is defence in depth: break both to read a single message. Every serious NATO cryptographic modernisation plan arrives at the same conclusion.
- —Session key = KDF( X25519_shared ‖ ML-KEM_shared ‖ transcript )
- —Transcript hash binds every handshake message; replay is a non-start.
- —Rekey on interval or bytes; old keys destroyed on rekey.
- —0.5-RTT first-flight payload means messages arrive before the full handshake completes on low-bandwidth links.
The whole Nexus Atlas family. Native feeds. One map.
Compass is the consumer of everything else in the portfolio. Each sibling product is a sensor, an effector, or a transport — and every one of them publishes into the Compass data model without translation layers. When you deploy the portfolio, the COP gets measurably smarter.
The Rust daemon that bonds WiFi, LTE, VSAT, microwave and LoRa into a single encrypted tunnel. Compass sits directly on top — Nexus Atlas is the reason the picture survives the loss of any single link.
Spots the vehicle that is following the principal. In Compass, every Backtrack detection lands as a typed contact on the map, with confidence, trajectory, and operator-ack.
Cellular counter-surveillance. Bastion alerts for rogue base stations and over-powered IMSI-catchers; those alerts arrive on the Compass map as geofenced threat overlays to avoid during principal movement.
The counter-ISR drone. Video, track data, and engagement state stream into the Compass map in real time. Blackbird is controllable from a Compass terminal when operator policy permits.
The RF decoy swarm. Compass shows Phantom node health, emission profile, and swarm geometry on the map; operators trigger emit windows and swarm relocations from the same COP surface.
Partner gateway product that aggregates heterogeneous radios, IoT devices, sensors and feeds behind a single endpoint. Compass treats EverywhereHub as a native transport and ingest source — no separate integration.
First-class LoRa mesh integration. Meshtastic nodes appear as devices, send position and short text natively, and inherit Compass end-to-end encryption when talking to another Compass endpoint.
The onion overlay that ships with Compass. Not a sibling product — a runtime subsystem. Listed here because it is the layer that lets the rest of the portfolio be useful when the fibre is being watched.
CoT-speaking plug-ins, third-party sensors, allied tablets — all bridge into a Compass net via a thin translator. Interop first, migration later.
Handset. Tablet. Laptop. Vehicle. Wearable. Adapter box.
Compass runs on the devices the operator already carries, plus a small family of dedicated hardware for cases where a phone is not enough. Same runtime, same account, same map, everywhere.
Android & iOS handset
Full COP, chat, PTT and file transfer on a stock Samsung S-series or Pixel. Ruggedized XCover for border/interior ministry fleets. Foregrounded battery profile ≥ 18 hours at typical duty.
Ruggedized tablet
Samsung XCover, Getac, Panasonic Toughbook. The preferred operator surface on foot and in vehicles. Glove-friendly input, sunlight-readable, MIL-STD-810H drop, IP67.
Linux / Windows laptop
Watch-officer, intel, and planning role. Multi-monitor layouts, bulk map-pack authoring, after-action export, forensic command-log review. The keyboard lives here.
Vehicle mobile data terminal
Dash-mount ARM-Linux MDT with ignition-keyed PSU, external antenna pass-throughs for HF, VHF, UHF MANET and SATCOM, and a 1-button operator PTT. Boots to the map.
Body-worn wearable
Chest-mounted Compass companion with GPS, IMU, PTT mic, and a subset of the app. Paired with the operator handset or tablet over Bluetooth LE. For roles where a tablet gets in the way.
Radio-adapter box
Field-ruggedised adapter that turns a legacy HF, VHF or UHF radio into a Compass transport. Audio-line + PTT keying via a standard Motorola, Harris, or NATO audio connector. POE or DC powered.
No mandatory cloud. No telemetry. No overlord.
Trust in Compass is not a promise — it is a set of structural choices. Each one is a deliberate exclusion of a category of risk, not a marketing statement. Here are the five that matter.
No mandatory cloud.
Compass runs fully air-gapped on a local MANET or LoRa mesh. Outbound connectivity is a choice, not a precondition. A unit in a cut-off compound keeps the map, the chat, the voice, the receipts. Only functions that physically require remote peers (store-and-forward to distant users) need external transport.
Stealth-Net is opt-in.
For sensitive sessions crossing hostile fibre, Stealth-Net is engaged. For short-range direct MANET or a trusted sovereign cloud, it is off — no sense paying the latency bill. Per-session and per-group policy. The operator does not decide; the configured policy does.
All crypto is auditable.
Every primitive in Compass is public, standard, and reviewable: Noise IK, X25519, ML-KEM-768, ChaCha20-Poly1305, BLAKE3, Ed25519, Reed–Solomon. No house cipher. No mystery curve. The cryptography fails the same way as the rest of the world's — which is to say, rarely, and loudly.
Post-quantum ready.
Hybrid classical + post-quantum handshake from day one. Migration from ML-KEM-768 to a successor is a version bump, not a rewrite. Captured ciphertext today does not become readable when a capable quantum machine ships.
No telemetry, no phone-home.
The Compass runtime does not emit anonymous-usage metrics. It does not auto-update from a remote server. It does not beacon its existence to anyone. Updates arrive through signed artefacts that the customer explicitly applies. This is unusual in 2026. It is also correct.
Source escrow.
Sovereign customers can place the full Compass source under escrow at a neutral third party, with rights to compile and run independently under defined continuity-of-operations clauses. We expect this to be used once a decade and made a condition for it to exist at all.
The numbers, published.
All values are design targets for the Compass reference deployment as of April 2026. They will drift — downward on latency, upward on battery and bandwidth — as the runtime matures. Customers get a datasheet per release.
| Subsystem | Parameter | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Cryptography | Handshake | Noise_IK pattern · hybrid X25519 ∥ ML-KEM-768 |
| Cryptography | AEAD | ChaCha20-Poly1305 · 256-bit key · 96-bit nonce |
| Cryptography | Hash / KDF | BLAKE3 · MAC & key derivation |
| Cryptography | Signatures | Ed25519 · device certs, receipts, command log |
| Cryptography | Rekey | Every 15 min or 32 MB, whichever first |
| Cryptography | Forward secrecy | Double ratchet on P2P · sender-keys tree on group (≤ 256 members) |
| Stealth-Net | Real / decoy shards | 30 / 30 default · tunable 10 – 60 each |
| Stealth-Net | Shard size | 1024 B padded · uniform on wire |
| Stealth-Net | Erasure coding | Reed–Solomon (30, 22) · 8-shard loss tolerance |
| Stealth-Net | Hop count | 3 – 5 onion hops · operator-policy selectable |
| Stealth-Net | Jurisdiction diversity | ≥ 3 distinct legal jurisdictions per message |
| Stealth-Net | Median overhead | + 150 – 600 ms vs. direct TLS · ~2 × bandwidth |
| Stealth-Net | Mailbox TTL | ≤ 14 days · blinded tokens · server-side auto-purge |
| Voice | HF codec | Codec2 · 700 – 3200 bps · FreeDV-compatible profile |
| Voice | IP codec | Opus · 8 – 32 kbps · adaptive |
| Voice | PTT latency (MANET) | ≤ 240 ms end-to-end · Opus 16 kbps |
| Messaging | Max group size | 256 members · forward-secure tree rekey |
| Messaging | Max file size | 4 GB single object · unlimited via manifest |
| Messaging | File chunking | BLAKE3-addressed chunks · 64 KB default |
| Messaging | CoT interop | CoT 2.0 ingest & emit · MIL-STD-2525 symbology · TAK-Server bridge |
| Transport | Supported layers | HF · VHF · UHF MANET · L/S · Ku/Ka · mmWave · LTE/5G · WiFi 6E/7 · LoRa |
| Transport | Link-scheduler tick | 12 Hz · per-radio bandwidth / latency / jitter / residual |
| Transport | Failover budget | ≤ 800 ms across a full layer outage |
| Transport | HF data rate | 75 – 2400 bps · ionogram-fed adaptive |
| Transport | LoRa / Meshtastic | Native · 0.3 – 37 kbps · sub-GHz · Meshtastic firmware bridge |
| Platforms | Mobile | Android 12+ · iOS 16+ · Qt front-end, shared Rust core |
| Platforms | Desktop | Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 9+) · Windows 11 · offline install artefact |
| Platforms | Vehicle MDT | ARM64 Linux · ignition-keyed · external antenna pass-throughs |
| Platforms | Wearable | nRF52 / nRF53 companion · BLE to host · GPS + IMU + PTT |
| Deployment | Air-gap mode | Full feature set on local MANET / LoRa · zero external egress |
| Deployment | Sovereign cloud | Customer-operated relay + mailbox pool · K8s or systemd |
| Deployment | Hybrid | Per-unit transport & Stealth-Net policy · live reconfigurable |
| Battery | Handset · mesh-only | ≤ 72 h on LoRa at low duty · 5 Ah handset |
| Battery | Handset · LTE + MANET | ≤ 18 h at typical duty · sustained PTT bursts |
| Battery | Tablet · XCover Pro | ≤ 14 h with sustained map & video |
| Ops | Update channel | Signed artefact pull · operator-explicit apply · no auto-update |
| Ops | Telemetry | off by default · on-demand support bundle only |
| Ops | Audit | Hash-chained command log · exportable · replayable |
| Compliance | Data residency | EU (Bulgaria-headquartered) · GDPR-clean |
| Compliance | Crypto alignment | Designed around NIST FIPS 203 migration · Noise protocol framework |
| Compliance | Interop | Designed for STANAG-grade interop · CoT 2.0 · MIL-STD-2525 |
The honest comparison.
ATAK is an excellent product. It is also not a sovereign one. This table is not an attack — it is a decision framework. If the rows below do not matter for your mission, ATAK is probably the right answer. If any of them do, Compass exists for that reason.
| Dimension | Compass | ATAK-class alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Jurisdiction | EU · Bulgaria-HQ · source escrow available · no US re-export dependency | US DoD stewardship · ITAR / EAR controlled · export licence per deployment |
| Transport model | 9-layer radio-agnostic bonded transport · HF ↔ mmWave ↔ LoRa, all first-class | IP-over-whatever-you-configured · single link at a time; HF is a plug-in |
| Traffic analysis | Stealth-Net onion overlay · 30 + 30 shards · multi-jurisdiction · decoys to decoy destinations | Observable flows · TLS terminates at a known server · timing and volume infer pairs |
| Multi-path / link bonding | Nexus Atlas native · sub-800 ms failover across full-layer outage | Single primary link; failover is an operator-visible event |
| LoRa / Meshtastic | First-class native integration · position, short text, receipts end-to-end | Community plug-ins · varying depth, varying maintenance |
| Post-quantum crypto | Hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 from day one · aligned with FIPS 203 migration | Classical-only by default · PQ on roadmap |
| Telemetry / auto-update | Off by default · operator-explicit signed update apply | Remote update channel · telemetry on by default in some distributions |
| Sensor portfolio | Native Backtrack · Bastion · Blackbird · Phantom · Meshtastic · EverywhereHub feeds | CoT plug-ins · integration quality varies per vendor |
| Source access | Source escrow option for sovereign customers · documented build pipeline | Community variants (ATAK-CIV) open · civ/mil variants diverge · gov variants closed |
| Interop | Speaks CoT 2.0 natively · bridges to ATAK, WinTAK, TAK-Server | Full native CoT · interop with Compass via bridge |
| Air-gap deployment | First-class mode · no outside egress · full feature set on local mesh | Supported; typically presumes a TAK-Server reachable somewhere |
| HF voice | Codec2 @ 700 bps native · FreeDV-compatible profile · runs over ALE link | HF plug-ins exist · bitrate & modem support vendor-specific |
| Cost of ownership | Per-endpoint licence · sovereign customers may self-host all infrastructure | Per-seat licensing · hosted-server or government-hosted infrastructure |
Where Compass earns its keep.
Seven missions Compass was built for. Each one failed a predecessor at least once in the last five years. None is hypothetical.
Border patrol under persistent GPS denial.
A border-guard squad on a forested ridgeline loses GPS for four hours and LTE for two. HF carries a position report to the district HQ every 90 seconds via Compass's ionogram-tuned profile; UHF MANET links the squad internally; LoRa reaches a downstream observation post without line-of-sight. The map never goes blank. The squad leader does not need to know which radio is carrying what.
Naval boarding party on a hostile cargo vessel.
A Bulgarian or allied navy boarding party drops onto a merchant ship in contested Black Sea waters. Ship hull kills LTE; SATCOM is intermittent at low elevation. The team runs UHF MANET between the boat and the boarding team, with SATCOM for higher-bandwidth bursts and HF as the last-resort link to the patrol vessel. Compass multi-path keeps chat and voice alive through all three.
Moving a principal through a hostile city.
A close-protection team runs a principal across town. Bastion flags a persistent IMSI-catcher near a route segment; Backtrack surfaces a co-travelling vehicle two blocks back; the detail leader diverts the motorcade on the Compass map, chat and PTT stay Stealth-Net-wrapped so adversary SIGINT cannot infer who is talking to whom. Arrival is logged into the command log; receipts are signed by every team lead.
Special-forces team, HF backhaul to HQ.
A small SOF element operates 600 km from its headquarters with no satellite window in the planned engagement hour. Compass carries position, voice at Codec2 700 bps, and short mission-update text across a single HF skywave link. The headquarters watch officer sees the team on the map; the operator on the ground hears his call-sign over PTT. This is what HF is for.
Disaster response with cellular flattened.
An earthquake drops cellular towers and knocks out road-bridge power. Civil-protection teams spread across a province with only LoRa and a few Starlink terminals. Compass meshes both, carries casevac nine-line templates from field medics back to coordination cells, and distributes the shared damage map without any team having to know where the data is coming from.
Operational privacy in a hostile jurisdiction.
Accredited journalists or an NGO coordinating aid inside an authoritarian state need to move, message, and receive files with traffic-analysis resistance. Compass in Stealth-Net mode routes fragments across multi-jurisdictional relays; decoy traffic to plausible third parties destroys the contact graph. Not circumvention — operational privacy as a first-class feature.
Hybrid-warfare coordination for operators.
A grid operator, a rail operator, and a port operator coordinate during a hybrid-warfare incident. The civilian management SCADA is degraded; the carrier's cellular is flaky; some of the fibre is suspicious. Compass gives the three incident teams a shared map, signed chat, and receipt-auditable decisions. Afterwards, the hash-chained command log is the evidence pack for the regulator.
Contested-spectrum defence.
Border-guard units under directional Russian EW operating in mixed terrain. LTE gone. GNSS denied. UHF sporadic. LoRa intact. Compass runs position and short text across the LoRa mesh, PTT across the MANET windows when they open, HF when the ionosphere cooperates. The operators have the map; the dispatcher has the picture.
A Compass runtime, talking to itself.
Synthetic CLI output streaming from a reference Compass node. Session establishment, shards in flight, decoys dispatched, receipts confirmed — rendered live. A small fingerprint of what the runtime says when it is working.
Honest answers, asked in good faith.
Questions we expect — and answer — in every serious customer conversation. Click any line to expand. If something important is missing here, write to office@NexusAtlas.io.
What happens if a jurisdiction seizes one of the Stealth-Net relay nodes?
How do you prevent Sybil attacks on the decoy layer?
What is the actual latency cost of Stealth-Net?
+150 – 600 ms over a direct TLS equivalent, depending on hop count (3 – 5), jurisdiction mix, and per-hop load. For tactical chat, file transfer, and near-real-time map updates, this is imperceptible. For PTT voice, the default profile downshifts hop count on voice streams; for truly time-critical voice, Stealth-Net can be disabled per-group, and a direct Nexus Atlas tunnel carries the PTT.
Does HF really carry a usable Compass session?
How does licensing and billing work?
Is Compass open source?
How does Compass interoperate with existing ATAK deployments?
CoT 2.0 natively. A thin bridge translates between a Compass net and a TAK-Server so that ATAK / WinTAK / iTAK users appear on the Compass map and vice versa. Symbology is MIL-STD-2525 on both sides. Allied ops can run mixed fleets during a transition; the Compass receipt layer adds cryptographic delivery proofs the ATAK side does not natively have, which is handy for after-action review.
What about offline operations? Does the map work without a server?
Can an adversary break the post-quantum crypto retroactively?
Who audits the code and the cryptography?
Compass is a concept. Your C2 problem is not.
Compass is concept-stage. There is no shrink-wrapped product to ship, no booth to book, no handset to hand you. What there is: an architecture, a set of sibling products it plugs into, and a team that wants to talk to people whose unit, ministry, convoy, or close-protection detail is today running on ATAK-and-a-prayer. Operator briefings walk the architecture and the honest limits; technical briefings go deep on Stealth-Net, transport, crypto, and integration. Start a conversation and we will tell you what the product is today, what it will be in twelve months, and whether your timeline is realistic.
Two ways in.
Operator briefing — for end-users, integrators, and procurement teams evaluating a sovereign ATAK alternative. We walk the architecture, the honest limits, the deployment math, and the integration path with existing CoT / NFFI / Link-16 estates.
Technical briefing — for engineers, research groups, and prime contractors. We go deeper: Stealth-Net shard geometry, Nexus Atlas transport, Noise IK + ML-KEM-768 handshake, mailbox / store-and-forward architecture, radio abstraction layer, and where we are looking for partners.