After a tracker leaves the network and becomes stale, the Forwarder plugin keeps broadcasting that tracker's PLI at the last location, using stale CoT packets based on the time of last activity.
Example:
09-01 23:32:03.998 31437 31698 V FWDDBG.TrackerCotGenerator: drawTracker() callsign: K************, meshId: !99999999, atakUid: null
09-01 23:32:03.999 31437 31698 V FWDDBG.TrackerCotGenerator: Tracker last seen: 8817144ms ago vs. trackerStaleTime: 300000, drawing stale: true
As far as I can tell, this stale point broadcast is repeated infinitely.
Why this is a problem
creates visual clutter that is neither informative nor actionable
creates unneeded network traffic
gives the team incorrect information due to detail panel still showing the item as "Last report: 0m XXs ago" (time when last CoT packet was received) even though the actual icon is greyed out
the tracker icon can't be deleted from screen - it comes back on every drawTracker() cycle
the only way (that I know) to get rid of the stale icon is to restart ATAK
Suggestion: do not publish CoTs for stale trackers - just set the stale timestamp correctly based on the user preference, and let ATAK fade them organically.
paulmandal
commented
3 years ago
After a tracker leaves the network and becomes stale, the Forwarder plugin keeps broadcasting that tracker's PLI at the last location, using stale CoT packets based on the time of last activity.
Example:
As far as I can tell, this stale point broadcast is repeated infinitely.
Why this is a problem
Suggestion: do not publish CoTs for stale trackers - just set the stale timestamp correctly based on the user preference, and let ATAK fade them organically.