AIS Monitoring

[WB2UZR]

Hi All:

I want to try to monitor AIS traffic in my area. Just curious what mode to use on the receiver to copy the traffic? I assume it sound like a noise burst? Is either frequency preferable to the other? I am watching traffic on the marinetraffic.com site, any other places to see traffic online? I might want to try one of the monitoring programs, any suggestions?


Scott/WB2UZR

 

[thomas724]

Ais

go to this page and follow the links. It explains a lot.
Discriminator Output

Also, if you want search sourceforge for free ais programs. I,m going to tap my scanner soon and do the ais next summer

Thomas

 

[ka3jjz]

Our wiki has links to 2 available decoders - if there are others, please add them here...

AIS - The RadioReference Wiki

73 Mike

 

[eorange]

I gave AIS monitoring a half-hearted attempt a few years ago and came up unsuccessful.

Bascially - I was 8 miles from the south shore of Lake Erie. I listened to both AIS freqs in NFM mode; one had faint, really faint data bursts and the other had zilch, so I knew which freq to use. I used an Icom R-7000 with a discriminator tap into ShipPlotter, but never registered one hit from over the air:

http://forums.radioreference.com/marine-monitoring-forum/53453-ais-great-lakes.html

Haven't tried it since. I have since moved (now 4 miles away from Lake Erie), but no longer have the R-7000.

 

[ka3jjz]

I'm not totally up on this, but I think this is very much a simplex operation - it's not repeated, AFAIK. So you would need to be reasonably close (or have a directional antenna if you are further away) to hear anything meaningful.

As I understand it, the ISS experiments on AIS are to address the various holes and other spots where coverage is difficult, and I believe it will be used as a 'proof of concept' for future satellite support.

73 Mike

 

[hill]

Mike is right it is simplex. Shipplotter is the best for hobby use. After paying a small price can even watch ship traffic in other others that fed into the internet.

 

[WB2UZR]

Thanks for the info, guys!

Scott/WB2UZR

 

[MrAntsy]

Hi All:

I want to try to monitor AIS traffic in my area. Just curious what mode to use on the receiver to copy the traffic? I assume it sound like a noise burst? Is either frequency preferable to the other? I am watching traffic on the marinetraffic.com site, any other places to see traffic online? I might want to try one of the monitoring programs, any suggestions?


Scott/WB2UZR

You can also see AIS on aprs.fi, here's the Miami area, for example.

 

[Spleen]

I just now got into AIS myself. I'm three miles from Baltimore harbor but apparently high enough AGL that an omni whip on the roof is enough to pull in AIS out to about five miles or so...

Shipplotter appears to be the de facto standard as far as inexpensive software featuring sound card decoding, Google Earth plotting, sharing to remote servers, and interfacing with other AIS- or boating-specific software. I do like being able to use .KAP files as overlays (underlays?) for plotted data, though once you start getting closer to harbors and tighter waterways the abundance of charted data might make the display a bit busy.

I've tested Shipplotter's decoding on a Creative USB sound card and the Realtek sound card embedded in an Intel motherboard and the results appear to be about equal, coming out of the discrim plug on a Winradio 1500E.

If you Google around you'll find quite a few sites that display current (and aged) AIS data...Shipplotter and some other apps can be easily configured to send the decoded data to those sites, which in most cases is easier than writing your own application to display plotted data on a web server...