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There's a similar open sharing service for tracking ships in the water: http://www.aishub.net/ http://www.aishub.net/ AIS technology works similar to ADS-B, bu
by NelsonMinar 7y ago
There's a similar open sharing service for tracking ships in the water: http://www.aishub.net/ http://www.aishub.net/
AIS technology works similar to ADS-B, but the details of being on the water make reception a different problem than for planes. There's three or so major ground-based AIS tracking services out there that compete, and while AISHub isn't the biggest it is the most open.
- wpietri 7y agoI've been participating in AISHub for a few years and really enjoy it. One of my projects is @sfships, a Twitter bot that announces major ships entering and leaving SF Bay: https://twitter.com/sfships https://twitter.com/sfships I also built a Python AIS parsing library with a bunch of command-line tools (e.g., aisgrep, ais2json): https://github.com/wpietri/simpleais https://github.com/wpietri/simpleais If anybody ends up using this, please let me know. On Twitter, I'm @williampietri. I have also been keeping a copy of all the AIS data for the last few years, and am happy to share it.
- adsbx-james 7y agoInterested in adding ADS-B to some of those AIS devices? ADSBx is always looking to partner for win-win installs!
- wpietri 7y agoI only have one receiver myself, on the north edge of SF, but I'm happy to set up ADS-B if you aren't covered here yet. Contact me via email or Twitter if you'd like.
- mike_d 7y agoVery cool Twitter feed! Would you consider adding a second account that doesn't include cargo/tanker ships so I can follow and turn on notifications?
- wpietri 7y agoInteresting! Which kinds of ships do you want, then? Just cruise ships? Tell me a bit more about why you'd want to be notified about them.
- mike_d 7y agoMilitary, search and rescue, police boats, cable layers, fire boats, icebreakers, etc. The sort where I could subscribe to notifications and get a few messages a day and go "huh, that is cool".
- wpietri 7y agoThe trouble here is that AIS is a pretty blunt instrument as far as ship classification goes. If you go here and scroll down to Table 11, you'll see what they transmit: https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/AIVDM.html#_type_5_static_and_voyage_related_data https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/AIVDM.html#_type_5_static_and_vo... Ships like you describe are also often weirder with what they transmit. Cargo and cruise ships go from known port to known port in reasonably predictable ways. (Reasonably predictable meaning that 50 or so regexes can usually extract a little sense from what some sailor types into a bridge console.) But a lot of data from smaller, less predictable ships is much less regular. Now that it has been running a while, I should definitely go back and see what else I can extract from the data. But one of my problems is that this stuff is poorly documented. What I really need is connections to maritime experts who can look at the data and say, "Oh, that ship is..."
- Bedon292 7y agoAre you keeping ALL AIS data, or all data for the SF Bay area? Curious if there are some fun research opportunities with that data.
- wpietri 7y agoI just recorded everything. There are some gaps, but I have something like 3 years at 50 million AIS lines per day. I keep 90 days locally, and then throw the rest in S3. I should say this isn't all AIS data, just all that comes through this particular network of receivers. For truly global coverage, there are satellite AIS receivers, but I don't have access to that.
- tlavoie 7y agoOut of curiosity, how is reception different? Basically, I'm wondering if it would be worth adding an AIS receiver to the ADS-B that I'm feeding to a couple sites already. E.g., do you need line of sight? I'm a couple km from water, not quite 100m elevation.