Category: AIS

I’ve been wondering what happened to the Coast Guard’s plan to require AIS on lots more commercial vessels plying U.S. waters, first discussed here in December ’08.  Unfortunately the legalese around federal rulemaking means that the normally very informative Jorge Arroyo — project manager in the CG’s Office of Navigation Systems — can only say that the comments collected in early 2009 are being analyzed.  I hope the Final Rule comes out soon, because looking at that slide above I see that compliance after the rule will take about half a year and, man-o-man, I’d like see those particular 17,442 vessels transmitting AIS ASAP…

When we got excited about the Standard Horizon GX2100 AISrx/VHF (now well documented at SH), did anyone realize that the already versatile CP30 RAM3 remote station would also show the targets?  Well, there it was in Miami, looking pretty much like the photo above.  And GX2100 love hasn’t waned; the set was one of West Marine’s show highlights and it won the NMMA Innovation Award in the Electronics category.  Of course there was plenty more going on in the AIS department…

Today Garmin announced the $500 AIS 300, the first receiver to output NMEA 2000 as well as 0183.  Which means that if you’re in Miami like I am, you can not only check out...

As noted recently Digital Yacht is on a new product roll.  To my knowledge this SmarterChart SC500A is the first new C-Map plotter in quite a while, and the first plotter to have a built-in AIS receiver period .  At $799 list, it might be just the thing for open helms on some smaller boats, for which DY also has a new line of helm pods (though they don’t seem to be online yet).  But some bigger boats might want one of these to serve mainly as an AIS target plotter (it has NMEA 0183 output too), and there are a couple of other interesting developements in that department… 

When I recently looked into the dismal-looking future of eLoran in the U.S., and read some of your comments to that entry, I felt obliged to write Secretary Napolitano asking her not to kill the Loran system.  My most unusual, and hopefully persuasive, argument was that she would be serving her boss — President Obama — best by reversing a poor decision that he’s endorsed, even crowed about.  Telling it like it is, even when that’s contrarian, is often the most constructive thing we can do for our friends and colleagues.  It’s in that spirit that I feel obliged today to note that my friends at gCaptain have introduced an iPhone AIS app that doesn’t seem competitive…

Very cool!  It looks like the compact and relatively inexpensive Class A AIS Transponder that SRT teased last summer is not only getting close to real, but that it will also — nice surprise — have NMEA 2000 output (in addition to regular NMEA 0183 HS and RS232 PC outputs).  The ComNav data sheet is available here (thanks, Dave!), but there are some caveats…

I’ve enjoyed the Ship Finder AIS viewing app as it’s gained features and available feeds, and particularly like how the latest 1.7 version draws targets with their reported heading (and course predictor lines if...