Pair your Meshtastic radio over Bluetooth — or plug it in over USB on Pro and Enterprise. That's the only hardware step.
Launch ATAK with the LANCE plugin active. No companion app, no pre-provisioning, no settings checklist.
LANCE checks the radio, writes the right template, verifies it, and turns the link green. You're on the mesh.
Other plugins make you install and configure a separate Meshtastic app first, then hope ATAK can use what it set up. LANCE removes that entirely — it talks to the radio directly. You need exactly three things: LANCE, ATAK, and a radio.
LANCE owns the effective radio template for your operating mode — channel, region, modem preset, hop limit, device role and rebroadcast — and writes it over the link. There's no manual entry to get wrong, and no drift between teammates because everyone runs the same managed preset.
The link stays yellow while LANCE configures and checks the radio, and only turns green once the device reads back the expected configuration. A brand-new, empty, or legacy radio — even one still on an old "ATAK" channel — is migrated automatically and verified before any traffic is trusted.
Simple by default doesn't mean locked. Pro adds Manual mode and multiple presets for expert control, and Enterprise can push curated configurations across a whole fleet — but none of that is required to get on the mesh.