An Online Live Map of Ships, How?

Factual Questions
21

I have a little knowledge. Disclamer: I work for CSC which sells hardware/software that does this stuff, though I don’t work on it directly. I’ll be building some training/how-to products though.

If you want to see what some of the radars look like (and can tolerate marketing speak) here’s a little video: https://suretrak.csc.com/default.aspx

The main thing is AIS tracking. A ship over, something like 50 tons (I forget) has to broadcast AIS. It contains a few different things like position, heading, and the MMSI (‘mimsy’ – a unique serial number)

You can use that marinetraffic site to check out a specific ship too. Random example:
http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/shipdetails.aspx?MMSI=210758000

So, big stuff does AIS. Naval vessels can choose to broadcast or not.

Some sites have radar as well to track things that don’t broadcast AIS. This is low level ground radar for ships (they move slowly) and/or radar for aircraft (they move fast). You won’t get ship detail data but you can determine heading/speed. They may blip in and out of radar depending on wave height, weather conditions, being masked behind something else (larger ship, buoy, etc)

All that data is combined and can displayed in all sorts of ways. It is pretty cool.

22

Amazing, but very handy for pirates I would imagine. I wonder about how responsible it is to show destinations for ships travelling round the Horn of Africa.

23

There is an international security corridor through the Gulf of Aden, with warship convoys, though there are attacks outside the corridor on occasion. I don’t see any vessels now in the current high risk piracy areas (the entire Arabian Sea over 12nm from the coast, and the entire Indian Ocean west of 78E and north of 12S), so it seems that the transmitter would be turned off in these areas.

We use this site for our jobs, when we want to know where a particular vessel is located (and our regular methods fail), and there is a bug with vessels not showing up. A workaround is to put in the IMO number and/or vessel name into Google, using the site:www.marinetraffic.com addition as well, and it usually pulls up some additional data.

24

Arr! Me live next to several bodies of water and got me own lighthouse right behind me backyard. That site is neat! Saw some of the vessels listed going up the Delaware River and the C and D Canal.

Arr!