Android Basic Walkie Talkie 
---------------------------

This work was initiated at Mil-OSS WG3 in support of Major James Neushul's 
objectives to improve both position location information (PLI) and radio 
communications in the field using consumer technology. The basic idea is 
to get handheld devices in the hands of individual Marines that can 
supplement the existing communications tools that may not be as easy 
to put in everyone's hands.

Position Location Information
-----------------------------

In a tactical situation, it is valuable to track three data points
about the location of peers:

 * Location on the network
 * Physical location on the planet
 * Location in your organization

Tactical Radio / Walkie Talkie
------------------------------

It would be great if people could talk to each other over a 'Walkie Talkie'
service using Android phones in a peer to peer manner consistent with
tactical radios. Some of the characteristics of this include the ability
to operate on an isolated network, and to emulate tactical radio networks
in order to leverage current tactics, techniques and procedures for
radio communications in the field.

Some of the basic features desired are:

 * Discover nearby peers
 * Encourage ad-hoc communication
 * Achieve IP voice communication, either point to point or broadcast
 * Hands-free operation on smart phones
 * Voice recognition in support of existing radio protocols
   * Radio Check
   * Authenticate
   * Identification
 * Network creation, management, and control
 * Simple user interface inspired by consumer electronics and toys, e.g:
   * http://www.yojoe.com/archive/nottoys/walkietalkie.shtml
   * http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3756101
   * http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4230605

This has been created as a community project in the hopes that it will 
be broadly useful.  This has the potential to be used for tactical military
communications.  However, it has been initiated in the public realm so
that it could also be used in more widespread applications. Some examples
of these uses are things like gaming (paintball, geocaching), personal 
radio services, public safety (police and fire fighters), public transit,
school bus operations, or finding your family or friends in a large crowd. 

We hope to leverage a larger community to develop software than is typically
involved in military projects. The broad, community-based collaborative
development model has lead to growing successes in many innovative projects.

Software Configuration Management
---------------------------------

This project uses github for software configuration managment.
The project's can be found at:

 https://github.com/mil-oss/walkitalkie
 
Pull requests and patches are welcome. Please use the issue tracker
to report bugs, to make feature requests or even to suggest full
user stories (we like agile methods). 

Credits
-------

The following people have contributed to this effort:

 * Gene McCulley <[email protected]>
 * Patrick Reynolds <[email protected]>
 * Chuck Atkins <[email protected]>
 * Richard Bullington-McGuire <[email protected]>
 * James Neushul <[email protected]>

Many thanks go to the Mil-OSS community <http://mil-oss.org/> and
Georgia Tech Research Institute <http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/> for hosting
both the Mil-OSS WG1 (2009) and Mil-OSS WG3 (2011) events that helped to
gel the community that supports this software.

The file yourbase.jpg is derived from a public-domain picture from
Wikipedia:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AWM_017402_Noemfoor_radio.jpg

The file yourbase2.jpg is derived from a public-domain picture from
Wikipedia:
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portable_radio_SCR536.png

License
-------

Copyright 2011 Gene McCulley
Copyright 2011 Patrick Reynolds
Copyright 2011 Chuck Atkins
Copyright 2011 Blackstone Technology Group
Copyright 2011 James Neushul

   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.