Category: AIS

I am a wee bit jealous.  That’s my brother-in-law Richard Itkin driving his Grand Banks 42 Brilliant down Chesapeake Bay this morning, having left New York Harbor yesterday morning (and Barrington, RI, on Tuesday).  As a guy who drove submarines and sub tenders for the U.S. Navy, Rich has a well developed appreciation for collision avoidance, and he’s been tickled with the ACR Nauticast B AIS transponder he installed a few weeks ago.  But before I pass on his reports, please click on the screen above, so I can note something I just realized regarding MarineTraffic.com.

The iPhone AIS app Ship Finder got updated a few weeks back, and darned if it didn’t add a large Eastern Seaboard feed that even includes the Penobscot Bay listening stations set up by the local pilots.  That feed hasn’t been public for some time, and I’m tickled to have it in my pocket, even if the data is delayed an hour.  Ship Finder is improved in several other ways, too, and has become one of my favorites.  Red Sky, incidentally, is a handsome 30m Swan that’s been hanging around Camden this summer.  Now I know she’s at Lyman Morse in Thomaston, which is near enough to the Rockland listening tower that her 2 watt Class B transponder gets picked up.  The same tower doesn’t see even 12 watt Class A’s in Camden, largely because of the hills, but if I get down the Bay next week (hoping), maybe I can engage in some AIS-style navel gazing?  And, now, for more serious matters…

In 2005, when Software Radio Technology talked about a Class B AIS transponder retailing for $500, I expressed some skepticism.  But “good work takes time” (as I often say about my home-built home), Class B has almost reached that price point in 2009 (largely thanks to SRT), and — holy cow, Batman — wait til you hear what they’ve got in the pipeline.  For starters, how about a small, high performance Class A transponder that will cost “well below $2,000” and will be available to client companies (SRT sells nothing direct) “at the end of 2009”?  And apparently that’s as both an OEM product virtually ready to ship or as a two-board module ready to get additional features (like NMEA 2000 output) and/or be integrated into ECDIS, plotters, VHF radios, etc…

I’ve been testing a SevenStar SeaTraceR Class B AIS transponder for couple of weeks now, mostly on Gizmo but also in the lab.  I could not detect any significant performance differences between it and other Class Bs, even when quickly swapping antenna connections and counting targets.  But it does have a nice over/under tilt mount that lends itself to numerous install positions, and it also has wires for a remote silent switch, like the ACR Nauticast B (though, also like the ACR, it has no built-in switch).  I’m pretty much convinced that the first generation Class B transponders all perform similarly (and pretty well), but what will we see when the next generation comes along?…

This was nice.  It was Friday late morning — after the fog burned off but before the torrential rains arrived (summer of ’09 is making history!) — and we were idling along in company with the school schooner Tabor Boy.  All of which was being colorfully portrayed on the Garmin 5212’s Mariner 3D screen; zoom in and you’ll see the Tabor Boy’s Class A AIS signal represented as a 3D icon with heading and track lines. You’ll also see Gizmo’s own Class B AIS represented as an unnamed dangerous target directly under our own boat icon, a little glitch we’ve already discussed…

Should I rename the blog iPanbo?  I know I’ve been focused on these marine apps a lot, but, as noted just last week, the developement velocity is awesome.  I first heard about Ship Finder...

Yesterday I fired up this sample Simrad AI50 Class B AIS transponder and found it to be pretty much as self-contained and impressive as I’d hoped.  I attached one of my boat’s VHF antennas, deployed the AI50’s included GPS antenna, gave the unit a little 12v juice (just 8 watts at 100% screen brightness), and, voila, Gizmo was transmitting its position and plotting other AIS targets, including another Class B I had set up as “Panbo.com Lab”.  A full AI50 entry will follow, but first I’ll report on its SimNet/N2K output.  I was excited about how easily NMEA 2000 could feed the AI50’s target and GPS info to all devices on the network, but nervous about that how well 2000 currently handles the data (nobody has yet tried it much). Both feelings were justified…

After METS 2007, I wrote about how many new AIS products Comar had in the pipeline.  Well, this U.K. company hasn’t slowed down, and has even developed a snappy new logo and Web site.  Comar’s latest is this AIS-Multi, which seems like quite an able AIS listener at $399 (from U.S. distributor Milltech Marine).  It features true parallel receivers, so slow Class B updates will plot as well as they can; an amplified VHF splitter, so you don’t need to add another antenna; USB data output, so you can connect it to a modern PC without needing a serial converter; and, finally, the ability to multiplex in NMEA 0183 data at 4800 baud (GPS most likely), so the unit’s 38,400 baud data output can be easily used with a plotter whose NMEA 0183 port was already in use (and the PC will get it, too).  But…