CHAPTER 1

Welcome to TacTrax

TacTrax is a moving map for people who work and travel across country where the roads run out. It shows you where you are, whose land you are on, what is in front of you, and it keeps doing that when the phone signal stops.

What TacTrax does

Open the map and you get satellite imagery with your position on it. Over that imagery TacTrax draws the things that matter on the ground: cadastral parcel boundaries, powerlines and power poles, railways and communications towers, buildings and fences, watercourses and dams, national parks and environment management areas, trails and fire tracks, and points of interest from helipads to fuel stations.

On top of the map data you add your own. Mark out an operating area from the parcels below you. Draw a polygon around a paddock and give it a name. Drop a point on a gate. Save the lot as a mission and load it again next week. Record your track as you go and play it back afterwards.

There are 47 map layers grouped into 8 categories, and seven operating modes that decide which of them are switched on when you start. You are never asked to configure all 47 — you pick a mode and TacTrax sets a sensible starting point, which you can then change.

image

Screenshot pending

mobile-map-hud

The MAP tab in Aerial Culling mode, showing the tactical HUD, an active operating area and the cadastral layer.

Two halves

TacTrax comes in two parts, and they hold the same data.

phone_android

The field app

Runs on your phone or tablet and is the half you use in the vehicle, the aircraft or on foot. Four tabs: MAP, PLANNING, GEO and RECORDINGS. It is built to keep working with no signal — download the area before you leave and every layer you chose is on the device.
computer

The web portal

Runs in a browser at tactrax.app and is the half you use at a desk. Review what you recorded, tidy your annotations, plan the next job on a large screen, resolve sync conflicts and restore anything you deleted by accident.

If you sign in on both, work you do in one appears in the other. If you do not sign in, the field app still works — your data simply stays on that one device.

What TacTrax is not for

warningNot for safety-critical navigation or emergency response

  • TacTrax is not intended for safety-critical navigation, emergency response, or any safety-of-life purpose.
  • Positional information produced by TacTrax — live GPS position, dead-reckoned position estimated while a satellite fix is degraded or unavailable, headings, distances and recorded tracks — is indicative only. It may be inaccurate, delayed or unavailable.
  • Do not use TacTrax as a primary or sole means of navigation, or in support of search and rescue, firefighting, medical response, maritime or aviation navigation.
  • You remain solely responsible for every operational decision you take in reliance on it.

TacTrax is a situational-awareness and planning aid. It is not a substitute for official charts, for authoritative boundary data, or for emergency services. Cadastral boundaries in particular are aggregated from state and federal open-data sources and may be out of date or simply wrong; before you act on a boundary — a fence line, a lease edge, a marine park limit — verify it independently with the relevant government authority.

This is not fine print bolted on at the end. It is the reason several parts of the app behave the way they do: why the position marker grows a confidence ring when the fix degrades, why the proximity warning fires 500 metres out rather than at the line, and why boundaries are drawn as an overlay you are meant to check rather than a limit you are meant to trust.

The full wording lives in sections 1.7 and 3.1 of the terms of use.

Before you start

The first time you open the field app it shows the beta terms and a liability waiver. You have to tick the box and accept before the map appears; once accepted it is not shown again.

After that, the fastest way in is to pick your mode, let the map find you, and read chapter 3 — the map screen is where nearly everything happens. Account setup in chapter 2 is optional until you want your work on more than one device.