Question about the fundamentals of TAK

[u/mister_drgn]

(This is a technical question related to TAK usage. Apologies if I'm posting in the wrong place.)

I was wondering if someone could help me out with understanding the fundamentals of TAK, or point me to relevant documentation. I'm a computer science researcher interested in working with TAK, and I've got a local server up and running in a VM. My core problem is that I can't tell if things are broken or working as expected.

My local server has an admin dashboard which provides WebTAK, with a map of the world. On that map, I can see a marker at 0, 0 which apparently corresponds to the admin who is connected via the website. I then have a client, which connects to the server using the admin certificate and sends a COT message. A corresponding marker pops up in WebTAK, but it disappears if I refresh the page, or if I open a new WebTAK instance after sending the message. It's as if either the message isn't being saved anywhere, or WebTAK is failing to retrieve it.

So I was hoping someone could tell me if (1) this is expected behavior, (2) this indicates a likely bug in WebTAK, or (3) there's some more general issue with my COT message or my TAK server.

I'd appreciate any help with this, or a pointer to somewhere else where I should be asking. Let me know if I need to provide more info. Thank you.

EDIT: Here's an example of a typical COT message. Note that the stale time is several hours in the future.

<event version="2.0" uid="swift-agent-06" type="a-f-G-U-C" how="m-g" time="2026-10-08T18:44:14.752Z" start="2026-10-08T18:44:14.752Z" stale="2026-10-09T03:04:14.752Z">

  <point lat="38.8951" lon="-77.0364" hae="0.0" ce="10.0" le="10.0"/>

  <detail>

<contact callsign="SwiftBot6"/>

<remarks>Swift TAK CoT test event</remarks>

<__group name="Cyan" role="Team Member"/>

  </detail>

</event>

[u/Brian-46323]

I'm not a computer science guy by any stretch, but I think Webtak is like RAM and wipes everything when you quit. When you refresh the page it's starting anew. Try Wintak instead or end-user devices connected to the network, which are more persistent. As for learning how to use TAK there are a number of good videos on YouTube. There is also the user manual which is included in TAK under Settings>Support>ATAK Documents. Also be careful as your coordinates are in the CoT message you posted, hopefully you set it up to show a spoof.

[u/mister_drgn → u/Brian-46323]

Thanks, it’s a dummy message.

[u/Brian-46323 → u/mister_drgn]

Good. Also, tak.gov has training videos.

[u/mister_drgn → u/Brian-46323]

I eventually came across the <archive /> tag which tells the server to store the cot message in its database, so at least now I have a way to get it to persist on WebTAK. I have a Linux machine and a Mac, so I don't think WinTAK is an option (or at least not a convenient one). I may make my own minimal client for experimentation purposes.