NATO Symbols in Your STK Scenario

Have you ever wanted to use NATO symbols to represent the elements of a common operating picture? Ever needed to demonstrate an STK scenario to a military customer and wanted to make it look awesome? Raku Symbol Server is a tool that gets installed along with STK and will allow you to easily generate the symbols needed to make a scenario that looks like this:

The Raku Symbol Server has a utility included that allows you to select the options that describe the object you want to represent. It then generates custom bitmap (.bmp) images of the appropriate R2525B symbol. You can use these bitmap files as a marker to visually represent your objects in an STK scenario. You don’t even need to know the Symbol ID for the object, because the utility will automatically create it based on your selections from drop down menus.

I’d recommend everyone take a look at this tool and see how easy it is to generate the symbols. On most machines, you will find this tool in this folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Object Raku Technology Inc\Raku Symbol Server SDK\TesterPrograms. If you’d like to have more detailed information about how to use this utility and bring the images into your scenario, take a look at this article. It will walk you through all the steps needed to generate the symbol for a friendly satellite and then import that as the marker for a satellite object in STK.