Category: AIS

Turkey is mandating some 25,000 commercial vessels to carry the unusual Class B AIS transponders seen above, which function like conventional ones but with some special added features. Note the extra SRM message buttons which should help nearby boats and SAR authorities to react quickly to collisions, fires, etc.  Also built into these units is a tracking scheme such that the Turkish government can identify vessels trying to avoid taxes by buying fuel in Greece!  Not only are safety, security, and even revenues driving a rapid increase in AIS mandates, but some amazing new AIS technology is just around the corner.  I learned a lot during a recent lunch with a man who may well know more about the worldwide state of AIS than any other…

Click above for a readable image, and see how blithely an anonymous Sailing Anarchy poster spread AIS misinformation, reinforcing a myth that threatens to curtail adoption of Class B transponders.   After first establishing himself as a sailor who uses an AIS receiver, he writes knowingly (but ignorantly) about specific AIS requirements around the world.  And then comes the doozy: “My recollection is that AIS Class A transceivers fitted to commercial
vessels have a big red IGNORE CLASS B Transceivers button to declutter
their displays and concentrate on avoiding vessels that will do more
than smudge their paint in a collision“.  That’s unadulterated BS on all counts — the big red button DOES NOT EXIST, the watch standers who don’t care about small vessels are rare, and this blowhard has probably never seen a ship’s bridge to “recollect” — but the myth continues to spread…

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…