Digital Yacht iAIS Wireless AIS receiver

[brine]

Does anyone have experience with this wireless AIS unit? It claims to enable wifi connection to iPad (which could have Navionics downloaded) and AIS data, receive only. It may be much more limited than sophisticated AIS installs, but still functional. Any opinions welcomed.

[Paul_DY]

I am from Digital Yacht so have plenty of experience , but hopefully other happy owners of our iAIS will chime in with some "unbiased" feedback !!

To answer some of your concerns though, I can confirm that our iAIS has one of the best dual channel AIS receivers of any AIS manufacturer and comes with NMEA0183, USB and Wi-Fi interfaces, so can connect to pretty much any AIS compatible display or App on the market today.

The Wi-Fi interface can support 7 devices connected to it and provide all of the received AIS data to each of the devices at the same time - so your friends and family can also use our free iAIS app on their iPhones/iPads without affecting what you are doing.

If you connect the NMEA0183 output from your boat's GPS or Instrument system to the NMEA input on the iAIS, it will also combine (multiplex) all of this data with its own AIS data so that you have one Wi-Fi link with all of the boat's data on.

It will not work with the Navionics App, as Navionics have not enabled their App to read external AIS data yet, BUT it will work with a number of other Apps including iNavX which uses Navionics Charts. For a full list of Apps that can receive wireless NMEA data from our iAIS, please have a look at this article on our blog...

[RichardS]

Originally Posted by Paul_DY

To answer some of your concerns though, I can confirm that our iAIS has one of the best dual channel AIS receivers of any AIS manufacturer and comes with NMEA0183, USB and Wi-Fi interfaces, so can connect to pretty much any AIS compatible display or App on the market today.

Hi Paul

I'm looking at the iAIS but I use a Windows Laptop on board running OpenCPN which does accept and display NMEA AIS data. Presumably the laptop will connect to the iAIS wifi hotspot, as it does to any wifi hotspot, so, once connected, can I direct the iAIS output into OpenCPN?

I couldn't see the link to your blog so the answer it might be in there.

Richard

[Paul_DY]

Hi Richard,

The iAIS will work perfectly with your Windows PC and supply AIS data wirelessly to OpenCPN. If you have a GPS or better still an instrument system with an NMEA0183 output, you can feed this in to the iAIS NMEA input and then this data will also be wirelessly sent to OpenCPN.

Unfortunately, I am not allowed to include links to our blog on these forum posts, but if you visit digitalyacht.net and search for iOS Apps, you will find the article at the top of the list.

BR
PAUL

[RichardS]

Originally Posted by Paul_DY

Hi Richard,

The iAIS will work perfectly with your Windows PC and supply AIS data wirelessly to OpenCPN. If you have a GPS or better still an instrument system with an NMEA0183 output, you can feed this in to the iAIS NMEA input and then this data will also be wirelessly sent to OpenCPN.

Unfortunately, I am not allowed to include links to our blog on these forum posts, but if you visit digitalyacht.net and search for iOS Apps, you will find the article at the top of the list.

BR
PAUL

That's excellent news Paul. I'll post this on the YBW forum as many of us seem to use OpenCPN. I also have NMEA0183 instrumentation so I can see this becoming a major project!

Many thanks

Richard