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?