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Comment by mik3y | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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!

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

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