M/V Brilliant, loving AIS
... written for Panbo by Ben Ellison and posted on Oct 23, 2009
I am a wee bit jealous. That's my brother-in-law Richard Itkin driving his Grand Banks 42 Brilliant down Chesapeake Bay this morning, having left New York Harbor yesterday morning (and Barrington, RI, on Tuesday). As a guy who drove submarines and sub tenders for the U.S. Navy, Rich has a well developed appreciation for collision avoidance, and he's been tickled with the ACR Nauticast B AIS transponder he installed a few weeks ago. But before I pass on his reports, please click on the screen above and note something I just realized regarding MarineTraffic.com.
Of course someone like Rich who's actually boating the coast doesn't really care about shore stations (though maybe he was "naval gazing" on his iPhone, as the feeds above are on Ship Finder). What he was excited about when he called was how useful his transponder had been when things got a little complicated as several vessels converged on the C&D Canal's east entrance in the dark this morning. He'd been able to easily speak via VHF with the bridge personnel on two tugs and learned that both could see Brilliant fine. On yesterday's call he told me how great it had been to see the ship below emerging from the East River well before he got a visual, especially as that didn't happen until they were very close, and the big guy was hogging the channel. Now that Rich is in the sunny south, maybe he'll learn to take better pictures (or Raymarine C120W screen shots) for future Panbo use (or his own blog). Just kidding!
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Ben, the MarineTraffic.com recieving station information is at least occasionally incomplete. For example, "Station 51", shown in Oakland, California, is actually an aggregated feed from about four San Francisco-area stations all within perhaps a 100 mile radius (I'm one of them). We combine and share our data, and send the aggregated AIS data to MarineTraffic.com.
So, there are more stations, and more widely distributed than indicated by MarineTraffic.com. However, the coverage is still very spotty.
It is possible to embed the MarineTraffic.com chart in your own website. I've got one, primed to zoom in on VALIS when her transponder is turned on, on the VALIS website (http://www.sailvalis.com/AisTracking.htm)
Another very interesting AIS sharing website is www.AisHub.net -- but you need to send them data before you get to receive their worldwide data. One nice thing about AisHub is that they have lots of Class-B traffic (since Class-B has been in use much longer in Europe, where much of their AIS data is coming from), and they also have live AIS traffic from SAR and Aids to Navigation (AtoN). If you are testing AIS gear, having the data from a wide variety of station types is extremely handy.