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Vessel Finder

vesselfinder.com

104 pointsgscott38 comments

If you're interested in building your own ship tracker, have I got an incomplete (but functioning!) quarantine boredom project for you:

  https://github.com/mik3y/airdash

The hobbyist AIS tracking world seems to be a bit less popular than the plane tracking (ADS-B) world. I started the project above to try to build a common frontend where one could show both; mainly because there weren't any frontends I could find for AIS traffic.

If you just want to decode the data, try rtl-ais:

  https://github.com/dgiardini/rtl-ais

I wrote up some quick instructions on getting it working on rasberry pi here:

  https://github.com/mik3y/airdash/wiki/Running-RTL-AIS-on-Raspberry-Pi

And a dockerized version here:

  https://github.com/mik3y/rtl-ais-docker

this is awesome, will definitely be checking it out.

ADS-B is definitely more popular than AIS, and I've always wondered why. Perhaps it's that airplanes evoke more wonder, and is more accessible over land than poor old ships?

Do DM me if you're looking for a position, or if you'd just like to chat about vessels, AIS and anything maritime.

We're building maritime intelligence at Greywing (https://grey-wing.com), and I'd love your input. In fact we have a Launch HN post up right now, so if you have any thoughts do drop them in!

Neat product! I'm a novice in this space but I'll definitely keep eyes on.

On adoption.. I think your hunch is at least part of it. I think another part, one that is very solvable, is there are not a whole lot of instructions for DIY hardware & software setups out there.

My impression is most AIS hobbyists use kits & proprietary hardware shipped from commercial providers (eg MarineTraffic), while rtl-ais is pretty obscure. Documenting what I can as I go to change it.

While we don't have a standalone AIS hardware product, we do have hardware and software that lets you relay AIS data both to us and out to other vessel monitoring systems. More data here:

https://support.floathub.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001334348-...

software only version here:

https://github.com/floathub/sfh

drop a note if you want any more info.

What are you using to display the S-52 and S-63 charts on the web? I worked on a VTS product (a small vendor, not any of the big ones), and there I learned that:

1) The sea charts are hugely expensive, the chart sellers want to sell you a subscription for a limited amount of time, that would just disappear when the time is over. "safety" is their justification for it 2) There are no open source libraries for drawing charts, the desktop chart drawing libraries are expensive, and it seems that the web products that output WMS are even more expensive.

We're focused on routing (shoreside) and not navigation at the moment, so we've been able to build a custom in-house map focused on the needs of crew managers and operators.

Unfortunately you're right about the rest - it's a problem that's pervasive throughout maritime. We've had to build our own routing engine, port database, and much more that we initially expected to buy/use.

ADS-B you can pick up from just about anywhere since planes are flying. AIS requires you be near enough a decent sized body of water/waterway.

> ADS-B is definitely more popular than AIS, and I've always wondered why. Perhaps it's that airplanes evoke more wonder, and is more accessible over land than poor old ships?

Having worked on product applications for both I'd say:

- There's a lot more B2B and especially B2C/B2B2C commercial use cases for ADS-B data, because flights are more time sensitive and more likely to carry passengers and commercial partners align schedules to the minute rather than to the day!

- The aviation enthusiast community is that bit nerdier and more timetable and "what did I just spot?" driven and can play with receivers even when not near the coast, so the crowdsourced ADS-B model works well.

- AIS is shorter range and has more issues with spoofing, data gaps etc (the commercial providers can clean it up but it's a bit more of a challenge for hobbyists)

Do you know of any APIs hosting ship AIS data for free? I did a bunch of digging on this a few years ago and essentially came up empty-handed.

Unfortunately no, all the feeding sites seem to be commercial operators with little incentive to open the feeds up.

I think it would be fun to build something like that though, the AIS equivalent of adsbexchange.com.

For access to more community-driven data out there, check out aishub.net. If you're able to operate a base station and contribute back, you should be able to get what you need.

You can trade AIS data with other people. The range is pretty good, but if you want to see anything out in the ocean you need one of the commercial providers who has a feed from a satellite.

What astounds me is that we have ships ferrying things from all over the world which are available nearby as well. Take this LPG Tanker, taking lpg from Egypt to the states and now its way to Singapore. You would think there are less roundabout ways of getting lpg ...

What's even more mind-boggling to me is that container logistics are so cheap that a pair of jeans now goes from Kazakhstan (cotton) via Turkey (spinning) via Taiwan (weaving) via Poland (dying) via the Philippines (sewing) via Tunisia (finishing) to finally be sold in Germany (or elsewhere in Europe) - see http://competendo.net/en/A_Pair_of_Jeans . So, because shipping costs next to nothing (or, at least, it used to), you can optimize your supply chain and find the cheapest alternative (probably also with the laxest regulations) for each and every step in a global race to the bottom. Capitalism at its best...

As a hard liner socialist I take issue with capitalism owning the wonders that is today’s amazing system of global shipping. The current state of affairs is due in most part because of standardization. Standardizing container size and loading mechanism makes shipping very efficient indeed. It would be stupid not to do it.

If we lived in my socialist utopia I’m pretty sure shipping would still be standardized and shipping would be just as efficient. And we would still experience the global trade network in all its glory (plus workers would get paid a fair share of the profits).

In fact I’m gonna be so bold as to claim that we live in this wonderful world of standardized global shipping despite capitalism, not because. A capitalist loves their proprietary technology so they can patent it and gain exclusive markets. A capitalist would dream of having the market dominant container spec which they can sell proprietary equipment, provide exclusive training and monopolize the market for containers.

Also note that global shipping relies heavily on socialist infrastructure. Docks are expensive and can often only be built by nation states funded by tax money. Sea charts, weather data, emergency response, positioning satellites, lighthouses, etc. are also almost always provided by nation states free of charged. One can definitely argue that global shipping is socialism at its best...

Sea charts are very expensive. Only a few countries have free charts.

The charts made by national hydrography agencies should be free, at least for the people of the respective countries.

Wow I did not know that. It also makes the whole system less resilient and slow.

Imagine moving these operations more together. It would be like going from an JEE stack to something that compiles natively and starts up in ms compared to the JVM.

That's the power of places like Shenzhen. Can source everything locally and manufacture it locally to turnaround prototypes in record time.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/ This is for any ship longer than 10 m. They need to have AIS. You will probably see why too many ships.

https://www.cruisemapper.com/ This is for passengers, ro-ro, ferry, etc

Also https://marinetraffic.com

There is also Localizatodo https://www.localizatodo.com/html5/

They have less coverage. I am not sure if they have a business model, but they do not try to sell me premium feature.

Cool! Never seen that one before.

10 points to you if you were able to zoom in correctly on the Suez Canal

https://i.imgur.com/uGHmeOI.png ... The 6th of October gave it away....

I just typed 'ever given' and it found it for me.

For me it started out there. But anyway the canal is clearly visible in the most zoomed out view due to the many ships there.

https://myshiptracking.com is an alternative without as many paywall restrictions.

(Note that initial load of ship data can be slow.)

I was quite surprised that this website seems to use a self-made map viewer. Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but it feels like by now everyone either just uses Google Maps and a minute, hardy fraction uses something based on OSM.

It could be a custom rendering of OSM data... whatever it is has full street grids for land-locked villages in the middle of France, which I can't imagine them gathering on their own. And their requirements (particularly for the vessel overlays) are peculiar enough that having their own renderer seems pretty reasonable.

Clicking [i] in the bottom right corner reveals this is indeed based on OSM data.

Kind of stupid design, as the [i] button is so big that a small always visible attribution could have fit better (just like on osm.org).

This is seemingly one of default options in OpenLayers (my guess based on how often I see this type of attribution). I wonder why people choose OL anyway. Sites using it in my experience have on average jankier UX than those based on Leaflet.

If you pull up a map through their embed functionality, you can see OpenLayers (https://openlayers.org/) and OSM is in there somewhere:

https://www.vesselfinder.com/aismap?zoom=8&lat=36.00&lon=-5....

Thanks! Good to know...

The increased pricing model Google Maps brought along a few years ago [1] makes it a lot less appealing for public-facing projects these days. It's still great for internal tools that have limited and predictable volume, but for anything public you'll both be building a cache layer yourself to reduce the costs as well as monitoring it closely. Something as simple as ending up on the HN frontpage could easily burn through your planned budget. Setting quotas only solves the problem so far since your service will still be unusable once you hit them.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing

Nautical maps (available, but not the default on vesselfinder) are usually a bit special. There's custom standards like ENC s-52/63/57 etc. Typically with a huge amount of symbol layers etc. Which is just one of the many reasons they may have gone with a custom openlayers solution

That was before Google increased the price to 14x around 2018.

Amazing to see how far inland some routes go.

On the US west coast, it's possible for fairly large ocean-going vessels to get as far as Lewiston, Idaho

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