Advice needed on AIS

[jeffrobbins]

Originally Posted by NahanniV

Can you give us more details about this DSC call setup API ?

-is it based on any standard, or is it proprietary to Vesper ?
-can you post the spec. ?
-What radios are supported ? connected by NMEA2000 or NMEA0183 ?

It's done with a simple proprietary command to the XB-8000/Vision. It can be sent via 0183, USB or Wifi. Any software or app developer that is interested in adding support for this can contact me for the details.

On the VHF radio side it requires support for remotely initiated DSC calls. At the moment, this is all current generation Icom fixed mount VHF's via NMEA 0183. We're very interested in expanding this to other radios but as far as we've been able to determine the support in other radios isn't there yet.

But that's why we did it this way. To allow the XB/Vision to abstract away the interfaces to different radios so software/app developers just have a single mechanism.

This may be obvious but for a successful call it requires the other vessel (the one you are calling) to have their VHF radio properly programmed with their MMSI. I expect this shouldn't be an issue with SOLAS ships but not all non-SOLAS vessels may have this properly setup.