This only covers container ships btw. For full coverage of all vessels, try the 'vessel presence' layer in Global Fishing Watch's interactive map, based on a feed from Spire: https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/
Years ago I used to subscribe to a service that did this for oil tankers and tried to estimate oil to each route, they wrote a weekly summary. Eventually they decided they only wanted enterprise clients and not people like me who, working in devops, had no need for this service at all and only paid the $20 a month out of some weird fascination
ADSBX used to be volunteer ran until JETNET paid the guy who controlled the domain name $20 million dollars to "sell" it to them and steal everyone else's source code and data. They now do selective filtering to appease their commercial clients.
Yeah that really sucked. It was a great volunteer platform and I was sad the guy sold out. It didn't filter anything. Not rich guys' jets, not military etc.
The community never really recovered. The airplanes.live one doesn't have as many feeders and the airframes.io is hidden behind a login.
I was hoping the community would simply move in unison to a new platform just like what happened when freenode got ruined. But it seems to have kinda fallen apart.
Especially the MLAT abilities (receiving traditional transponders pre-ADS-B) was really cool but it really needs a lot of feeders to be able to pinpoint them.
Nitpick: It's called Contributor and supposedly has the same features of the previous subscription. It still feels like a setup for future degradation by some marketing genius.
Yup, nothing changes now, but I'd pretty confidently place bets that the tier will have reduced features compared to the "Business" tier (or whatever it's called now)
One massive problem with AIS is that it is open. This opens it up for spoofing, intentional or not. The global map is littered with garbage AIS positions, but mostly in areas that do not have strong AIS coverage to begin.
To combat this, some countries have started to enforce their countries to use VMS (vessel monitoring system). I say some, but mostly the more resource rich countries - Norway being one of them. VMS also comes with the benefit of much more data capabilities, like fishing vessels sending catch data.
Sensor fusion to detect dark vessels is also a big growing thing. We use around 5 different sensors outside the usual AIS, VMS, LRIT to build vessel tracks. Some are experimental sensors, while others are seeing more mainstream use - like navigation radar sensing.
Maybe a challenge for private entities that want to create these sorts of apps, is data - buying even just AIS data can be expensive at scale. Countries that deal with this often engage in data exchange...some data provider receives data from you, you get some in return for them.
Seems regionally biased. This map makes it look like the Americas barely see any ship traffic, while the South China Sea is paved with ships from shore to shore.
The way I understand marinetraffic works is by having AIS receivers near shores and sending any received contacts to an API. If this works the same way then there's probably a lot fewer receivers so far.
I once worked on a problem: GPS tracking shipping containers, since one company had almost 1% lost/stolen each year. I had an idea of using AIS with Si4362 to get positioning data from the container ship itself, but it was nearly impossible to get access to reefer monitoring systems. We ended up just using 4G NB-IoT for coastal tracking and it did solve the problem
It almost seems like I could have lived life as a trader and traveled the seas. Don’t know the type of money involved, and I guess I wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that in real life. So much easier in video games.
I’d just be a simple TEMU hauler, no fuss, simple life. Travel the world, catch some fish.
Interesting, a cool resource for an API endpoint for AIS data so aisstream.io. Seems quite solid. Any one any idea of a good resource for satellite AIS data - I feel like the EU probably funded it and I can’t find anything on capricious etc.
Military ships don't run their radio beacons in combat zones. (There was an incident last year where the USS Theodore Roosevelt collided with a civilian cargo ship at night at least partially because it tried to approach the Suez canal with it's beacon off.)
Off topic, but I hope the UX improves. It's almost unusable.
Clicking on anything is an error-prone mess and then it hijacks the back button by changing the URL. That would be better off as a simple "share" link somewhere in the popup.
This seems useful speculating on short term oil prices. I believe the straight of hormuz may be closed or rumor of closing. Every expert seems to think that will spike oil prices.
These tools went mainstream when the Houthis started hitting container ships. Watching AIS transponders go dark or vessels suddenly diverting around the Cape was something you just couldn't get from news coverage. And with Hormuz tensions right now, the real-time value is even higher.
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