AIS tracking by sat?

[estarzinger]

Anyone know anything about services that provide offshore AIS tracking by satellite?

Cost? Best providers?

[Astrid]

Not sure if this is quite what you are looking for, but give this a shot:

Marine Traffic Vessel Tracking | Free AIS tracking

[dan360]

NASA has been working on it with the ISS: NASA - Space Station Keeps Watch on World's Sea Traffic

There are ground based relay stations and you can also submit your AIS position via internet, so it is available on the web via various sites such as the one posted here.

The AIS you'll see on your boat will occasionally show a big ship hundreds of miles away when both it and you are in range of a very tall shore based relay, but mostly you'll see whatever line of sight on you and the target provides for. We find this to be 20-50 miles depending on the size of the ship, which is plenty. Although 20 miles gets eaten up pretty quickly if you're going 10 knots and they are going 18 and you're converging.

[madsb]

There is group of engineering students that have produced a small satellite for this very purpose. See AAUSAT3 Main/AAUSAT 3 Home I don't know if their observed data are available for the public.

dan360: With respect to "ground based relay stations", do you have any source to base this on? As I understand it there is no automatic relaying taking place anywhere, but I might be wrong. My guess would be that the occurrences of far away contacts are due to Sporadic E propagation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or Tropospheric propagation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .

[Emmalina]

There is already 2000+ sats up there and over 140000 bits of old ones its getting "busy" up there. I wish we could agree to use each others equipment...

[Paul Elliott]

I'm not aware of any commercially-available satellite AIS tracking feeds. NASA, the USCG, and others have been playing with this, but it's still in the experimental phase.

(As far as I know)

Here are some links relating to satellite AIS research. Some are pretty old:
exactEarth | AIS Vessel Tracking | Maritime Ship Monitoring
http://www.exactearth.com/assets/Upl...fing-S-AIS.pdf
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg9/nais/docu...cle1-APR07.pdf
http://www.nordicspace.net/PDF/NSA239.pdf

exactEarth mentions their ground and satellite monitoring capabilities, but then say "exactEarth is deploying a constellation" of monitoring microsats, so I don't know if this is available now, or just planned for the future.

[dan360]

Originally Posted by madsb

dan360: With respect to "ground based relay stations", do you have any source to base this on? As I understand it there is no automatic relaying taking place anywhere, but I might be wrong. My guess would be that the occurrences of far away contacts are due to Sporadic E propagation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or Tropospheric propagation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .

I don't have a source, and had based my comment on an assumption based on my experience in the Med - where there are lots of ground stations and we could regularly see ships >100 miles and in the middle of the Atlantic when we only saw stuff when it was nearby - you can see various AIS stations as targets on land, and I figured they were simply rebroadcasting.

This suggests that is possible - but is not totally clear.
Transas | AIS Base Station

[Lodesman]

Originally Posted by estarzinger

Anyone know anything about services that provide offshore AIS tracking by satellite?

Cost? Best providers?

I would guess that you would need some form of satellite comms - Inmarsat or somesuch. Try a fleet tracking service: FleetMon Satellite Tracking - innovative fleet monitoring service with desktop and mobile access, satellite AIS and Inmarsat - FleetMon.com

[Paul Elliott]

Originally Posted by dan360

I don't have a source, and had based my comment on an assumption based on my experience in the Med - where there are lots of ground stations and we could regularly see ships >100 miles and in the middle of the Atlantic when we only saw stuff when it was nearby - you can see various AIS stations as targets on land, and I figured they were simply rebroadcasting.

This suggests that is possible - but is not totally clear.
Transas | AIS Base Station

With the proper conditions, from my boat in mid-ocean I've been able to receive AIS from well over 200 miles away. From my hilltop AIS receiver site I've received ships out past 1000 miles. Hams have made low-power VHF contacts between California and Hawaii. This is all due to "tropospheric ducting" propagation. No relay stations required.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by estarzinger

Anyone know anything about services that provide offshore AIS tracking by satellite?

Cost? Best providers?

Orbcomm are definitely providing a commercial sat AIS service, contact them, Evans. ( The IMO has published rules for this service,which limits the data availability)


ExactEarth are also in the commercial sphere and have a fully functioning product I beleive. Again there are rules of engagement as to who gets the data


Its much more advanced then people beleive. Big Brother IS watching you.
dave

[denverd0n]

From OrbComm's website...
"Annual subscription service agreements and user applications for global, regional and filtered satellite AIS data are available to both qualified government and commercial customers."

My guess is that this translates to, "We are really, really expensive!"

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

From OrbComm's website...
"Annual subscription service agreements and user applications for global, regional and filtered satellite AIS data are available to both qualified government and commercial customers."

My guess is that this translates to, "We are really, really expensive!"

Yes and No, The rules of engagement agreed by the IMO are that sat based AIS is such a powerful tracking system , that the data feeds are only supplied to 'qualified' people or groups. ie you or me cant justify it.


So for example if you just want a filtered feed to track your companies shipping fleet. Thats fine and relatively inexpensive ( note relatively).

If you or me want to track somebody elses fleet , thats not fine.


as well as being expensive!

Dave

[Paul Elliott]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

Orbcomm are definitely providing a commercial sat AIS service, contact them, Evans. ( The IMO has published rules for this service,which limits the data availability)

Thank you for the information. I did not know that Orbcomm was this far along. If anyone is interested, they should visit the Orbcomm website and watch the "Satellite AIS" video: Satellite AIS

I see that they currently have two AIS-equipped microsats: one in polar orbit, and another in equatorial. This is valuable, but the coverage will be very spotty in terms of how often a particular area will be covered by the satellite's footprint. They are supposed to be launching many more this year (and may have already launched some?), and this will be a huge improvement in coverage.

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

From OrbComm's website...
"Annual subscription service agreements and user applications for global, regional and filtered satellite AIS data are available to both qualified government and commercial customers."

My guess is that this translates to, "We are really, really expensive!"

Funny enough I used to work for orbcomm and my first boss was their vp of engineering (David Schoen); he literally wrote 90% of the code that runs the satellites and constellation management.

Really neat environment to work in. I loved it when meteor showers would come through and we'd have to realign the satellites to keep them out of the debris path.

[denverd0n]

Originally Posted by madsb

With respect to "ground based relay stations", do you have any source to base this on? As I understand it there is no automatic relaying taking place anywhere, but I might be wrong.

Here is a picture from the IMO page about AIS...

While I find nothing on the page that specifically says signals get relayed, that picture pretty clearly suggests that they do.

Link here... http://www.imo.org/OurWork/Safety/Na...Pages/AIS.aspx