I made a web app called Portsviews that shows cargo ships, tankers, ferries, and tugs moving in real time, each with its wake. It’s designed to run all day on a wall screen or a table, or to be projected onto the ceiling.

Right now it reads the AISstream feed. I’d really like to support local receivers too (AIS-catcher, rtl_ais, and similar).

Two questions for people who run their own receivers:

What output would you want it to read: NMEA over UDP, TCP, or something else?

What would make AIS data more interesting to watch?

It’s free and open source. Next, I’m working on a dedicated display version.

Hi fellow station operators,

This post was prompted by the seavec.io thread earlier today about sharing receiver data, which got me thinking about a problem I’ve been stuck on.

I run an AIS receiver in Varna on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and feed a few networks. I also build Sirena Seafarer, an iOS marine navigation app with live AIS. Right now I’m working on a research project about GNSS jamming in the Black Sea, the increase in attacks on ships here, and attacks on AIS data itself (spoofed or manipulated positions).

At the moment my sources are AISHub and aisstream.io. To properly cross-check positions I need at least 2 or 3 more independent sources. Most of the commercial side now sits under one owner (Kpler has MarineTraffic, FleetMon and Spire Maritime), so I’d rather not rely only on that.

My questions:

1. Are there other networks or APIs that share station data for free or at low cost, ideally with Black Sea coverage? National or port authority open data would also be great if anyone knows of any.
2. How can an individual or researcher get satellite AIS? Who actually sells it at a small scale, and what does it roughly cost? Are there academic or research programs?
3. Has anyone here compared feeds from different sources to catch spoofed positions? What worked for you?

In return I’m happy to share Black Sea data from my station and whatever I find in the research. It feels like a more open, decentralized network would help everyone here.

Thanks, and fair winds.

Hey everyone,

Over the past year, I’ve been working on extracting maritime routes from AIS data. This started during my vessel trajectory prediction research, when I struggled to find usable known routes to validate my prediction models.

That became today seavec.io, where you can visualize routes between ports or points at sea.

I’ve mainly worked with publicly accessible AIS sources. The North Sea and Baltic networks use Danish, Finnish and aisstream data, and I recently added US coverage using NOAA’s historical AIS archive. I used three months of AIS data for the US network, so there are still mapping gaps.

The biggest challenge has been finding sufficiently complete data for other regions, particularly East and Southeast Asia. I’d like to improve that coverage with more AIS observations.

I'm considering implementing a way for people to contribute feeds from their own AIS receivers, or historical recordings. So my question is for people that are already sharing AIS data or thinking about it. What would make it worthwhile for you to share the data: access to routing tools, receiver statistics, attribution or something else?

I'm using the Uputronics 162 MHz filtered preamp in front of a dAISy 2+ for a small coastal AIS station (homemade vertical dipole on the roof, about 10 m of coax down to the receiver).

Right now the preamp sits indoors next to the receiver and is powered over USB-C, as in the photo. It already helped, but I keep reading that a preamp should go at the antenna, before the coax loss, and be fed over bias-T instead.

For those who use this one:

- Did moving it up to the mast make a real difference in range or message count?

- How do you weatherproof it outside?

- Any issues with overload from nearby VHF traffic? I'm close to a port with a lot of marine radio.

Happy to share my message stats before and after if I end up moving it.

I have been operating an AIS station for about 3 years now.
I had this Raspberry Pi 3b since 2016, I used it for video game emulation but then I decided to do something else with it.
I managed to improve performance a lot lately, by moving from RTL-AIS to AIS-Catcher and installing a FM band stop filter.
I'm using a ship AIS tranponder whip antenna with it.
It went from about 40 - 60 targets to about 130 in a good day.

hello everyone, I am looking to access AIS data for vessel traveling near Portugal over the last 30 days. Do you know where I can access this information hopefully for free but if not, I’m willing to pay.

Or is someone could help me. I am looking for the data along the Portugese coast below lisbon from Sept 4 2026 - Sept 24 2026. In the area below.

Today received dAISy AIS receiver for pi and hope to become AIS feeder nearest days…

as I‘m building own ADS-B+AIS network i am going to test several solutions and this one I like becouse I don’t need any other additional filters or amplifiers… but I am new in this hobby and may you guys could help me with advice which alertnatives are available on the market and how stable are they 🙏👀

thanks for support and happy to join to the AIS-community

Sharing a short AIS recording of Virgo Transport 8 before it capsized on 13 September.

The vessel reportedly encountered severe weather and later developed a list before communication was lost. The exact cause is still under investigation.

The video shows the vessel’s movement tracked on HiFleet, which can be used to monitor ships and review AIS movements.

Curious to hear what others make of the track as more investigation details emerge.

Can anyone show me the satelite ais position of cma cgm d’artagnan please

Hi all, I'm looking for a help with a free API to get AIS data for just one vessel approximately 20 to 100 Max requests in a day, maybe 2 or 3 days a month.

Is there anything out there that's suitable?

Thanks

Been working on this project last few weeks. Setup at my parents house in Hull, MA: Retevis MA06 marine antenna in a window facing Boston Harbor → RTL-SDR → Pi 4 running rtl_airband. The entire US marine band is only ~1.4 MHz wide, so one dongle grabs the whole thing in a single window and rtl_airband demods every channel in parallel 16 labeled Icecast streams instead of one scanner hopping around and missing half of everything.

From there each stream ships to a backend that runs speech-to-text on all of it, and an LLM sorts a day of radio into the ~5 minutes actually worth hearing. Marine VHF is dead boring until it very suddenly isn't. Week one my node caught a 29ft Cobalt with 7 people aboard taking on water calling Sector Boston on 16. Whole exchange, start to rescue. I put a replay on the site with captions synced to the chart - docktalk.app, scroll to the demo phone.

The ask: Boston works, I want 5 harbors before the iOS app ships. If you have line of sight to a busy harbor, the install is now one curl command with a claim code it pulls your harbor's channel plan and you show up on the leaderboard at docktalk.app within a minute. ~$165 in parts, ~$112 if you have a spare Pi (any Debian box works honestly), and if your spot is genuinely good I'll just ship you the kit free. Hosts get the app's premium tier free for as long as the node runs + credit on everything their box hears first.

Straight up since it always comes up: this is a company I'm building, not an open-data project audio goes to our network only. If that's a dealbreaker, all good. If you already feed aisstream/FR24/MarineTraffic, this doesn't touch your existing setup, it's one more dongle to your existing set up!

RX only, public unencrypted spectrum, same legal footing scanner feeds and LiveATC have been on for 20+ years.

Happy to go deep on the RF chain, rtl_airband config, or the ASR pipeline in comments.

Once I get 5 harbors covered I'll launch the iOS app!!

No unique identifiers for each transmitter? No overarching standard for it? What's to stop someone from inserting a boat lurking around a carrier group (other than their own radar)?

I've been using SkyWatch Desk Radar's ship mode to track live ships and it's really cool to see all their info on a map. What are you using?

Dear All

I need AIS data of 28 vessels (I have MMSIs) with me at 5 min resolution for 90 minutes for 12 Jan 26 of Gujarat, India Coast.

Can someone help me in this? I downloaded through datalastic, but it’s at 1 hour resolution, which does not help my use case.

Thanks

Bit of a long shot, but worth asking 🙂

Does anyone have access to historical AIS archives and could export the track for MMSI 269115630?

Date range:

2024-09-01 to 2024-09-30

CSV would be perfect, but honestly any format is fine.

It's for a small private analysis project and I don't need an ongoing subscription – just this single ship and this single month.

Happy to receive a download link, CSV, GeoJSON, GPX, or whatever is easiest.

thanks!

MarineTraffic.com shows one single American "pleasure cruise" ship that's been parked in the same spot for days. I can't find any info on it or its destination. Interested in how/why it's parked in such a contested location because I'm a nerd. Any info would be awesome.

I've been looking into AIS data/API providers and noticed a growing number of smaller vendors (e.g. DataDocked, AISStream, CommTrace, Live-AIS, etc.) offering global vessel tracking data at relatively low prices (in contrast to MarineTraffic/Vesselfinder)

What I'm trying to understand is the actual upstream data supply chain, especially for satellite AIS (SAT-AIS).

As I understand it, the main primary SAT-AIS operators are mainly ORBCOMM, Kpler (with MarineTraffic/FleetMon)

I'm wondering:

Where do smaller AIS/API providers actually source their global satellite AIS data?

Are they:

• Reselling/white-labelling ORBCOMM or Kpler feeds?
• Using intermediary data aggregators or wholesale resellers?
• Combining partial SAT-AIS with terrestrial receiver networks + data fusion?
• Operating under undisclosed licensing agreements?

Also: is there still any meaningful independent SAT-AIS supply outside of the Kpler/ORBCOMM ecosystem, or is the market effectively a duopoly at the infrastructure level?

Would be interested in any insights from people working in maritime data, OSINT, or commodity/vessel tracking.

I am captain on a small tug operating in NY harbor, we go east as far as New Haven CT and North as far as Albany Rensellaer.

There is at least one dead spot on the Hudson where I cannot track my tug on MarineTraffic.com

I am toying with the idea of becoming a receiving station and forwarding the ais data from my tug, so that myself and the office can track us and other ships through the dead spots.

is there a preferred software for windows I can run in the background? I have a windows machine running 24/7 with 5g internet, when available. I can also add a raspberry PI if need be.

any suggestions or caveats appreciated.

Sharing the latest vessel movements across Hormuz and surrounding choke points.

Strait of Hormuz

Inbound: 1

Outbound: 2

Anybody know anything about this boat? Or is this just being spoofed?

on multiple feeders

I’m a mobile station for MarineTraffic, and enjoy the free accounts they give me. I’m often the only roaming station near me, and use MT often to see vessels around me. The past few days I’ve been seeing strange behavior from a nearby vessel. MMSI 368240110. What’s going on?

Hey guys, I could get hands on a cheap dAISy HAT already assembled to a Raspberry Pi5 in a nice metal case. I wanted to share that experience with you - just in case someone else wanted to try this combination and runs into some problems. The guy who sold it to me told me it works fine and he just gave up boating, so he doesn't need it anymore.

The setup contains the "standard" active cooling you can get for your Pi5 and the standard space between the Pi and the HAT (there are these spacing nuts, don't know how to call them, I'm no native speaker). Powered it on and the HAT was blinking like it should, but I really couldn't get a signal via

screen /dev/ttyAMA0 38400

I did everything to activate uart0 on the pi, deactivated bluetooth, etc. but nothing worked out. So I wanted to check, if the uart0 works at all by connecting TX and RX and listen for the echo of my messages. While disassembling I noticed, that the HAT wasn't really sitting tight on the GPIOs of the Pi, the space between the Pi and the HAT is just too wide. So I removed the spacers, set the HAT directly on the cooler of the Pi so the Socket fits tight on the header, tried connecting again and everything worked fine! So I got rid of the short socket and installed on with longer pins I had lying around, so I could get a little bit space between the cooler and the HAT.

I hope I could help someone out who got this combination too.

tl;dr:

When using active cooling on a Pi5 you need more space between the HAT and the Pi5. The pre-installed socket on the HAT is too short to get a proper connection - just replace it with a longer one.