Category: AIS

Yesterday Raymarine issued a press release announcing replacements for its existing AIS receiver and Class B transponder, which I’ll link to when possible. But, in fact, some online dealers are already offering the AIS650 Class B transponder, as well as the AIS350 receiver, and they also bear a family resemblance to the new generation SRT OEM gear discussed in June, which is not a bad thing (and no big surprise given that SRT announced a strategic agreement with one of “the world’s top three marine electronics companies” last February). Let’s see if we can figure out what’s new and different…

Em Trak — or Em-Trak or em-trak (why do brands defy grammar conventions when it causes multiple misspellings on other sites?) — is a completely unfamiliar name to me, but it’s pretty darn obvious that the interesting array of new AIS gear displayed on their web site is closely related to the new AIS modules SRT debuted yesterday. The cases may be different (and jazzier) in some cases, but I’m seeing some of the same new features along with ones apparently added by Em Trak…

I remember a few years ago when some boaters worried about “Big Brother” style AIS surveillance while the IMO fretted about hobbyists using shore receivers to display real time coastal AIS info on the Web.  But all that seemed to go away, because — I think — people realized that AIS is indeed a public information network and that there is nothing especially threatening about its use by agencies or amateurs.  But today I was struck by a “fatcat1111” comment stating that “I absolutely do not want to update the Fed with my location every 30 seconds” and that he or she hadn’t felt that way until they read the Practical Sailor article above by marine safety expert Ralph Naranjo.  Well, maybe I’m completely blind about “personal freedom” but I’ve read Ralph’s article a few times now, and I just don’t get it…

While exciting things are happening on the frontiers of AIS, there’s still some tragic ignorance about what the technology can do right now for marine safety, even from folks who should know better.  But...

Why not ask the man who wrote the book?  Dr. Andy Norris writes authoritatively about ship level electronics for the Nautical Institute and Digital Ship; has chaired IEC Technical
Committee 80 on maritime navigation since 1992; once worked as Technical Director for Kelvin Hughes and helped start ChartCo; and is himself a sailor who’s earned an RYA Yachtmaster Ocean certificate.  Plus he’s helped Panbo readers (and writers 😉 better understand the limitations of AIS before.  So when I recently attempted to deconstruct the notion that watchkeepers use filtering tools built into the new ship radars with integrated AIS tracking to completely ignore Class B AIS targets, and then found indications that it is sort of possible, I asked Dr. Norris — whose IEC committee wrote the spec — to please “clarify just what’s permitted in terms of AIS target filtering.”  The issue, he warned me, “is more complex than it looks”…

One of several things I like about the latest (2.29) version of the Ship Finder HD AIS viewer for the iPad is that when you zoom out you’ll see available targets grouped by the shore receivers that Ship Finder’s developer (“pinkfroot” is its unusual name) currently has access to.  Some users seem to have a hard time getting the concept, but as I’ve written before, “the most important thing about a remote AIS viewer — be it on the Web,
or an iPhone, or wherever — has to be the data feeds it uses.”  Pinkfroot now also has a free Web viewer that shows the same data feeds.  The truth is that coverage around much of North America is pretty darn spotty and will stay that way until more of us set up receivers and give the data feeds to Pinkfroot and all the other developers who rebroadcast it for public enjoyment…