hckrnws

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/

https://www.marinetraffic.com has most AIS transponders, I use it to track friends on commercial and private vessels.

https://aprs.fi also shows AIS (as well as ham radio operators which is its primary function)

Doesn't track all container ships. I'm looking out my office window at Eliot Bay (Seattle), I see two container ships not on the map.

https://aisvesseltracker.com/ is a good one too. Shows a LOT more, including cruise ships and pleasure craft.

Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting. I've used Vessel Finder due to something being a nuisance with Marine Traffic.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/

It's also a bit limited. The gold standard is still kpler.

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

Meta: I like the use of an actual globe when zoomed out. Wish more things would do this.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall–Peters_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_equal-area_project...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMfXVWFBrVo

I bet many of you can guess what scene from what show that points to.

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What is different from marinetraffic?

Marinetraffic is a good example of enshittification. Started well, now it's heavy and ad-laden, practically useless without a paid account.

Sounds like Flightradar24

In case anyone isn't aware:

https://globe.adsbexchange.com

– is an alternative to FlightRadar24 with more data.

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.

Everyone has moved to https://globe.airplanes.live/ and https://app.airframes.io/flights now.

Here is the lawsuit from one former group of contributors: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm...

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.

How do airplanes.live and airframes.io compare to FlightRadar24? I've only ever used the latter.

Unfortunately adsbexchange does not allow you to see the source/destination of flights

Untrue

Click on the aircraft, then click on Flight Activity.

The inscrutable buttons in their UI are terrible for mobile/tablet access. I wish the discoverability was better

At least for FR24 you get a "Gold" account (no longer business) simply for running a feed.

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)

Kpler acquired them and it's not consumer friendly anymore. They are focused on enterprise accounts only now.

I find Marinetraffic is fine without an account.

Here is a link to oil tankers anchored around the Strait of Hormuz. It has much better filters:

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:56.8/cente...

Any of these provide satellite data without charge?

Also - is there any sites that publish parsed data from SAR sats?

And what’s the similarity to flight radar?

A real time visualization using AIS instead of ADS-B feeds, presumably

as opposed to the dozens of other flight tracker sites?

This is ships not aircraft

Seems to only have a tiny amount of ships compared to marinetraffic.com ?

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.

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.

I hope they expand it in such a way that anybody could uncover the ships of the Russian "shadow fleet" and put more pressure on politicians and officials. Suspicious draught or erratic position changes or incorrect data upon leaving/ entering a port would be key to detecting possible circumvention of sanctions.

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.

Seems like it's just cargo ships? And presumably not even all of them.

I'll prefer vesselfinder for marinetraffic.

How does this differ from something like MarineTraffic?

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.

I tried posting ais-catcher.org but it got ignored

Doman needs to be www.ais-catcher.org

I don't see any of the American destroyers in Hormoz

This is only for container ships.

Did anyone spot the USS Abraham Lincoln?

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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Looking good! Thanks for sharing