MyDigitalJourneyman
About

A builder, not a slide deck.

Andrew Bowen is a retired master electrician and former tower climber who spent his career building power and communications where failure wasn't an option: war zones, U.S. embassies, secure government facilities and the backbones that connect them. He designs MyDigitalJourneyman the same way.

Master electrician (retired) · FCC amateur radio KJ6YJR · FAA Part 107 remote pilot · UL-certified lightning protection

Where it started

A phone-company kid with a scanner by the bed

His dad worked for the phone company. Instead of TV, he fell asleep to the police scanner. He earned his ham radio license young and grew up a hacker, with Kevin Mitnick as a friend.

No college degree in computers. Everything on this site, from the TAK server to the mesh to the AI teammate, is self-taught.

The road

Power and comms, around the world

A trade career that ran through war zones, embassies and secure government sites, with a master electrician's license and a climber's harness.

  1. Afghanistan. Electrician at Kandahar Airfield, Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion in Helmand (the base the U.S. and U.K. split down the middle), forward operating base Camp Dwyer, and Bagram.
  2. Iraq. Two years as an electrician on the Lockheed Martin F-16 program at Balad Air Base.
  3. U.S. State Department. Embassy electrical work in Hanoi, Bangkok, the Marshall Islands, Djibouti, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Riyadh, Bucharest and Kenya.
  4. Towers and backbones. Tower climbing for point-to-point microwave backbones and relays that carry private high-speed networks, and dark fiber along the I-80 corridor for government communications.
  5. Lightning protection. A specialty, and one of the first to earn UL certification in it. Anything we mount up high gets grounded the way that work taught.
  6. Camp Peary, Virginia. Called out from Texas for a final assignment as an electrician for the CIA.
  7. Home to California. He and his wife came home, and not long after, his mother Diane died in hospice. He put down the tools and started building this: his own servers, a TAK server, a radio mesh and an AI teammate, taught to himself one piece at a time.
How he learned TAK

Hands-on first, then two years of building

"I learned TAK the way it should be taught: two days in person, phones in hand, with a live aircraft video feed streaming into the class while we set up plugins. Then it took me two years to stand up the official TAK Server on my own hardware.

That's why we teach one tool at a time, outdoors, with real feeds on the map. You get the hands-on part without the two years."

How it runs

Linux, run like infrastructure

The platform runs on ordinary servers, administered the way a mission-critical electrical room is: documented, labeled, and boring on purpose.

  • Our own machines. Real servers on our own workbench, not rented space in someone else's cloud. Every piece is documented and labeled.
  • Fiber to the workbench. Symmetrical high-speed fiber, as fast up as down, so live feeds, video and a whole team on the map have room to spare.
  • Local AI. Language models run on our own hardware. Nothing about your team or your facility goes to a cloud model to be decided.
  • Watched. Every service is monitored around the clock, and a full restart of the whole system is tested, not hoped for.
  • Disconnected by design. If it can't run without the internet, it doesn't belong in the stack.
On the bench

Everything here is running today

Each piece had to be learned, built and tested on its own, then tied into one system. That's two years of work, and it's what our customers don't have to do.

Our own TAK server

running

The official TAK Server, with our own digital ID for every phone. Nobody gets on without one, and each group is private.

Ready on first connect

running

New phones receive our maps, overlays, icons and vetted plugins automatically, from our own package and update servers.

Our own data pipeline

running

Sensors and public feeds come in, get cleaned up and archived, and go out as live markers and layers on the map.

Airspace awareness

running

Our own aircraft receiver tracks what's flying overhead around the clock, shares it with a worldwide flight-tracking network, and watches for aircraft declaring an emergency.

LoRa mesh

running

A base station and tags bridged into TAK, chat that crosses between the mesh and the map, and remote admin over the air.

The AI teammate

running

A member of the team in chat and on the map, reachable even over the mesh. Everyday requests run on a language model on our own hardware.

Live public-safety layers

running

Traffic, freeway cameras, fire, satellite hot spots and earthquakes, reworked so they load reliably in ATAK and switch on and off.

Watches and alerts

running

Nearby earthquakes, fires close to home, a radio that drops off, an unexpected visitor on the server: each one lands as a direct message on the right phone.

Dashboards and the record

running

Live dashboards for every service and radio, every event logged and kept, a brief every morning and evening, and full restarts tested, not hoped for.

Weather

running

Our own weather station, received by radio and shown live on the map.

Software-defined radio

running

Radio receivers that can listen across the airwaves, for surveys and finding what's on the air at a site. Listen only, never transmit.

Run from a phone

running

The whole system is administered from a phone, from anywhere, over a private encrypted network. Nothing on it is exposed that doesn't need to be.

Get started

Talk architecture, training or access

Tell me what you're working on. I'll reply personally.

Server details and credentials are never posted publicly. They come privately with your setup sheet.

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