Seven surfaces. One library. No signal required.
Alphatac is a field manual you can search, a compass and map that don't need a tower, a plan for your household, a way to learn the skills, and a way to find your people. Every part of it works with the phone in airplane mode, because that is the condition it was built for.
Three taps to the right card.
A red control that is always one tap away. It opens a tree of situations, not topics: someone is bleeding, not breathing, burned, poisoned, lost, fire, flood, the power went out, someone died. Each branch is three taps deep at most and ends on a card with timers and a next step.
- High contrast, large type, one-handed, glove-friendly. Reads the card aloud on request.
- You don't need to know what a tourniquet is called to find the tourniquet card.
- The forms a responder actually uses, kept as reference: MIST, SALUTE, a patient card that persists through the event.
- Bleeding
- Not breathing
- Burned
- Poisoned or exposed
- Lost
- Having a baby
Browse by pillar, by situation, or by the tool in your hand.
Twelve pillars, four levels each. Search is the main event: instant, typo-tolerant, phrase-aware, across a quarter million pages, entirely on the device, with results grouped by level so a dose and a textbook chapter never fight for the same slot.
- Bookmarks, reading lists, highlights and notes, all on the phone.
- "I have a chainsaw" is a valid way in.
- Any article prints to a card, a sheet, or a booklet with a table of contents.
Ten minutes on a Sunday.
Who is in your household, where they are, medications and their expiry dates, allergies, the communication plan, rally points, what you have on the shelf, and who can do what. From that, a gap list in plain words: four days of water for six people, nobody can treat a burn past first degree, your only radio operator lives forty miles away.
- Gaps become a prioritized list that links straight back into the library and Learn.
- Seasonal checklists turn readiness into a habit instead of a project.
- Your plan is encrypted on your device and leaves it only when you export it.
Skill paths, drills, and the ham exam pools.
The pillars become skill trees. A path is an ordered set of articles, hands-on drills and checks: Medic 1 through 4, Comms 1 through 3, Grow 1, Build 1. The FCC question pools are in there in full, so you can go from nothing to General class without the internet.
- Drills are timed, hands-on and checked off. Quizzes come from the same content that powers search.
- A group can see who has what. An instructor can sign a completion.
The calculators that would otherwise need a spreadsheet.
Weight-based dosing. Chlorine by container and bleach strength. Calorie-days on the shelf for your roster. Solar array and battery bank from a load list. Generator runtime. Antenna cut lengths and propagation windows. Concrete volume, span tables, cordwood per winter. Each one links to the article it implements.
A compass that knows where north is, even when GPS doesn't.
The phone's satellite receiver, magnetometer and barometer all work with no cell service. Nav uses them: true heading with declination corrected on the device, position in lat-long, MGRS and UTM, waypoints and breadcrumbs, a big arrow back to rally, grid overlay and pace count, sun, moon and tides, an inclinometer, a barometer storm trend, and a flashlight with Morse and SOS.
- GPS-denied mode: when the receiver loses lock or reports an impossible jump, Nav says so and switches to dead reckoning, with the shadow-stick and star cards on the same screen.
- Blackout mode: red screen, minimum brightness, satellites polled slowly, no sounds.
Find each other without a tower.
A people list, a map, and four buttons: I'm OK, Rally, Help, and chat. Everything sealed on the phone before it touches a radio. Runs over pocket LoRa radios and the Alphatac Node with no network of any kind. The operator in the family sees the same group in ATAK, because the Node is also a TAK server.
Your phone, a thumb drive, a box in the house, or paper.
| Form | What it is | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Phone app | iPhone and Android. The core library ships inside the app; the bigger packs download into the phone. | Everyone, day one. |
| Portable | A folder on any USB drive with the app, the packs and a one-click server for Mac, Windows and Linux. Double-click and it opens in the browser, or serves your laptop's hotspot. | Laptops, go-bags, gifts. |
| Node | A small box with its own radio that broadcasts Wi-Fi. Serves the whole library to every phone in the house, runs the family map, stores messages, and works as a TAK server. | Households and groups. |
| Paper | Cards, sheets and binders printed from any article, path or plan. | Everyone, as the backstop. |