Tactical situational alert PLUGIN
Ragazzi, good morning. My father and I were analyzing the Alert button and came up with the idea of a small plugin for quick, visual communication with our teammates.
There are moments when we are unable to notify our teammates, because for technical reasons we cannot make a call, send a chat message, or communicate via radio. So, when we need to let the team know that at that moment we cannot pay attention to the chat or talk on the radio, it would be useful to have a plugin that allows us — for example, by pressing the volume-down button twice — to set our marker on the map directly to red. Or, possibly, to create a small dot next to our marker that turns red, or even to make a small "muted" icon appear inside our marker on the map, etc. This lets all teammates understand that at that moment we cannot talk: because I'm driving, because I want a moment of radio silence, because I'm emptying my bladder (lol), because I'm in a quick brief during an emergency scenario and I'm talking to someone — in short, because I have a sudden need and cannot pay attention to the chat for brief moments, and all these kinds of things.
It should obviously be considered a momentary status marker, which does not disable anything for me as an operator: that is, if I wanted to make a PTT call or send a message, I could. In fact, it would be nice to tie the status to these cases and have it turn off automatically when it detects that we open a channel or send a chat message (but I realize that's an extreme idea, though it would be cool). But let's stay humble: implementing a menu for manual deactivation would be the way to go.
A timer could also be added — 5, 10, 30 minutes, 1 hour or more — that when it expires returns our status to normal (this in case of forgetfulness).
A momentary need that I would like to communicate quickly.
Emergency version: obviously it would be nice to program other functions. For example: with 4 presses of volume-down, one could activate a sort of emergency "enemies on my position, help" or "they've got me, help"; with volume-down held for 3 seconds, "help, I'm hurt, I can't walk", "I've had an accident, help". In short, there's a wide range of factors and modes — I'll leave that to the more experienced programmers. Obviously the choices should be customizable, or one could even write a small message like "run, rendezvous at xxxxyyyy".
In these two cases, it sends an alert with vibration to all teammates, like the Alert application already present, but with greater potential — that is, situational clarity and information.
The ATAK Alert is interesting, but you're always forced to activate it from the menu, and in a real emergency it doesn't give you the possibility to write info: teammates only see "emergency" and that's it, which personally doesn't make much sense.
What do you think? Would it be a nice thing?