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Privacy — what leaves this phone

The full policy is in Settings → Privacy, and there is a link to it at the foot of the start screen. The one people are surprised by: the map fetches its tiles from Esri, OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap and CARTO as you pan. Those services see your IP address and, from the tiles you ask for, roughly where you are looking — whether or not you have joined a unit, because the tiles are what draws the map. Downloading an offline area in advance fetches them once and then serves them from the handset, which is the way to stop it. Nothing else leaves the device unless you are joined and you send it.

The policy is a draft and has not been reviewed by a lawyer. It was written against the code, so where the app does something the policy would rather it did not, it says so.

Voice notes

The + beside the message box has Voice note. Press Record, speak, press Stop, and listen back before you decide — nothing is sent until you press Send. Two minutes maximum, and it stops itself at the limit rather than losing what you said.

This is a recording, not dictation. It is not converted to text and nothing is sent to a speech service — the audio is captured on the handset and attached to your message like a photo, sealed the same way, and it works with no signal. Dictation would mean sending your voice to Google, which is a data path nothing else in TRUVEK has; it is waiting for the installed app, where the phone can transcribe without sending anything.

The microphone is released the moment you press Stop. Under EMCON blackout the recorder will not open at all, for the same reason the GPS will not.

Messaging anyone in your unit

The + beside DIRECT MESSAGES opens New message, which lists everyone on your unit roster — not only the people you already share a net with. Search matches call sign, name, rank or appointment. Tapping someone opens the conversation.

Before v406 the list could only offer people from nets you were already in. On a large unit that meant most of the roster was on your phone and simply not reachable. The ORBAT organises people; it does not decide who you may talk to.

The ✗ on a message, and what it means

A message is sealed when everyone it is going to has published a key. When that is not true it still sends, in the clear, and the bubble is marked ✗. That mark is the one thing worth looking for. Sealed, the server holds ciphertext it cannot read; unsealed, your unit administrator can read the text.

Either way the server always knows who you messaged and when. Sealing hides what you said. It never hides that you said it.

Fixed in v404: some direct messages were being sent in the clear while the ✗ blamed the other person for having no key, when they had one. Roughly one pair in three was affected and nothing on screen was wrong enough to notice. If you were told a contact had no key before v404, that may not have been true.

Since v298 — what changed

Your position on the map. Opening BATTLE NAV now takes one GPS fix so the map can show you straight away. Nothing is transmitted — it draws a dot on your own screen and stops. It does not track you: there is no repeating fix and no automatic reporting. EMCON blackout suppresses it entirely — under blackout the receiver is never powered up, the SELF box says so, and the ◎ GPS button is the only way to take a fix. Sending your position to anyone is still a deliberate act: ⇧ Send pos.

Sending the map to ATAK / TAK. Battle Nav → LAYERS gives you KML, CoT/TAK, JSON and GeoJSON. Which to use, honestly: KML carries your whole map in one file and is the one to reach for — arcs, obstacle lines, kill zones and marks all arrive, though they land as plain shapes rather than military symbols. CoT carries proper symbology and affiliation — friendly, enemy, neutral, unknown — but ATAK imports only one item per file, so it suits a single grid rather than a fire plan. Importing a file puts it on that device only: to share it, send the items to your TAK server or add them to a Data Sync mission from inside ATAK.

Opening a report you have received. Press and hold the report, then Open report. It opens on its own with Cancel, Back and Forward — Back returns you to the net the report came from, Forward sends it on to another net.

Writing a report. Choosing a type now replaces the type list with that report's form, so you are not scrolling past forty buttons to reach the first field. Back returns to the list and keeps what you have already typed.

Since v310 — what changed

Sending a report to anyone in the ORBAT. The SEND TO box takes typing now. Start a name, rank or net and it predicts from the ORBAT — including people you have never messaged, who were simply absent from the old list. Picking one opens the conversation for you.

The map on paper. Battle Nav → PDF prints the map with a title block: DTG, the centre grid in your coordinate format, the layer, and a legend of what is on the map. Choose ‘Save as PDF’ in the print dialogue for a file you can put in a set of orders.

Bearings and fixing a location. Battle Nav → ∠ Brg. Enter a bearing in whatever you are working in — degrees or mils, True, Magnetic or Grid — then take it from your own position or tap the observer on the map. Two bearings give a fix. Three draw the cocked hat, with the fix at its centre; the size of that triangle is how good the fix is. It will refuse bearings that do not genuinely cross, and warns you when they cut at a shallow angle, because a confident-looking fix from bad bearings is worse than none.

Manoeuvre graphics. SYM now carries LD/LC, Limit of advance, PLD and Report line, and Assembly area, Attack position, Battle position, Engagement area and LZ/HLS. There is a Mission tasks group — SEIZE, BLOCK, FIX and the rest — which drop as labelled marks. They are labels, not doctrinal task graphics; they say what the task is without pretending to be MIL-STD symbology.

Turning a symbol. Tap a placed symbol → FACING for its direction, or REINF/RED to mark it reinforced or reduced. Weapons keep their arc instead.

Numbers the map now tells you. Tap an area and its size is in the title. The LEGS panel shows the total distance of everything you have plotted. The SELF box shows your GPS altitude when the device actually has one.

Turning things off. The dashed range-and-bearing line to the crosshair has a switch — press DISP, then R&B. The readout stays either way. And Settings → Start blank clears everything: nets, members, messages and the map.

What changed since v341
• Actions on a net is now a pop-out list rather than an inline expander, and the map opens full screen.
• Exports in the installed app COPY TO THE CLIPBOARD — they do not download. Android gives an app no downloads folder, so saving would have written nothing at all. Paste the copied text where you need it, or use TRUVEK in a browser to download a file.
• A map overlay can be sent to a net as an attachment: open Layers, then ➤ Send to net. Whoever receives it taps Add to my map.
• Naming a layer, a feature or a call sign now uses an in-app box. On Android the old system prompt silently did nothing.
• Resources lists the military aides first, with the ERG volumes and ICS mnemonics grouped under Incident Command System.
• If the device runs out of storage a red NOT SAVING bar appears. It means what it says — export or write down anything recorded after it appears.
• On a phone the map opens with its toolbar stowed so you get the whole screen. ▴ Tools brings it back, and it remembers.

Help is current to v410 — if a screen does not match, check your version at the bottom of Settings. This build starts EMPTY - tap + in Nets to build your org, or Settings then "Load demo platoon" to see a worked example. PROTOTYPE — UNCLASSIFIED.

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