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It is not a new hobby but it is new to me. Ship watching is akin to railroad train watching is akin to airplane watching and so on. Ship watching is fun especially if you live where I do in Southern Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. My wife and I can see passing ships from our living room window. As luck would have it we own a home on a small hill with a panoramic view of the Chesapeake Bay at Plum Point, Maryland.

A wireless add on of sorts has added to the excitement of ship watching. In addition to our binoculars our Automatic Identification System or AIS receiver gives us lots of information about the ships coming and going. We now see data transmitted by most passing ships on a computer screen that includes the name of the ship, it’s destination, speed, geographic coordinates, and even its draft, width, and length. We know the call sign of the ship, in which country it is registered, and its international registration number maintained by the International Telecommunications Union. Even cooler we have exported the data to a small Internet based Google map even our neighbors can enjoy.

The Internet is a great place to find information on ship watching or ship spotting. Many enthusiasts maintain ship watching pages that include photographs and data about many of the ships civilian and military. It is a great thrill to see a huge cargo ship go by on the Bay as well as a U.S. Navy submarine with its Navy gunboat escorts, and even the Coast Guard’s Tall Ship, The Eagle, the Schooner Virginia, or the Tall Ship The Pride of Baltimore 2.

Wireless nuts like me can add to the visual enjoyment by adding AIS data. Picture yourself sitting on your deck under your umbrella watching a ship pass by through your binoculars and then glancing down at your laptop to read more about the ship in front of you. You pick up your digital camera and save a photo of the ship so the next time it passes by you have a photo of the previous encounter or a picture to share with friends that missed it!

There are companies like SiiTech.com that share their AIS data used in commercial applications with the general public. We also send our data to SiiTech so that others living along the Bay can see more data about the ships than our little novelty website currently provides.

Getting started in AIS is technical and it’s not inexpensive. The PopularWireless AIS receiver was purchased from MilTech Marine for about $289. It is the SR-161 AIS “Smart Radio” receiver. The antenna connected to our receiver is a J-Pole antenna by Arrow Antenna for $39. The sixty or so feet of cable is LMR-600 low-loss cable purchased at around a $1.00 per foot. Then there was the climbing, crawling, and construction required to put it all together. The receiver is connected by serial cable to a good computer with lots of computing power and the software used to display the ships on a local PC marine chart is ShipPlotter available from ShipPlotter.com for about $30.

The cool thing about this Smart Receiver is that it runs on twelve volts DC and takes very little power to operate. One could travel with it to various harbors and points where ships pass and use it to add enjoyment to their ship spotting. Picture yourself with a laptop over looking your favorite harbor monitoring the comings and goings as you watch and photograph your favorite ships. To use the receiver in a mobile environment you simply add a good magnet mount VHF antenna tuned for the AIS frequencies. There you are having the time of your life with AIS and your binoculars.

Even when its foggy on your favorite waterway you can still see the ships on your AIS radio map. Combine your AIS monitoring with a simple inexpensive radio scanner and you can also listen to the ship’s officers talk with other vessels and perhaps even the Coast Guard. Scanning the marine radio frequencies is fun even if you do not have an AIS receiver. The radio signals from ships generally travel forty to fifty miles or so but during tropospheric ducting events the radio signals here have come from Virginia, New York, New Jersey and far out into the Atlantic Ocean. This aspect of the hobby is a fascinating introduction into the science of radio wave propagation. Careful, because this wireless hobby may be enough to interest you in Amateur Radio!

Ship watching has never been so much fun. The hobby is great for adults and children. Visit the PopularWireless.com AIS site for the Chesapeake Bay if you are curious. This hobby is so cool we may just have a Ship Spotting forum on the Personal Wireless BBS sooner than you think!

Canadian Military Signs Contract to Evaluate Suitability for Northern Surveillance.

(PopWireless: COMM DEV wants to receive AIS data by satellite and make the data available on earth eliminating the need for thousands of shore based dedicated receivers. This is interesting because AIS monitoring by ship spotters is a new and exciting hobby that got its start when AIS was created in 2004.  PopularWireless maintains an AIS receiver on the Chesapeake Bay at Plum Point, MD to assist in the identification of ships using GMRS radio frequencies in US waters - FSI identification. The PopularWireless AIS receiver data is output to a publicly available Google Map.)
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The WordPress blog software at this site was upgraded today to 2.3.1. Please contact us if you notice any strangeness.

The PopularWireless.com AIS Google Map introduction page was updated with some useful information on tropospheric ducting.

We encourage readers to leave a kind word for Riley regarding his planned retirement from the FCC. See article on the subject below. Thanks to Matthew for starting the thread. (Thanks to the ARRL web site.)

Is the Personal Radio Association having an impact on Foreign Shipping Interference? We can only hope. On Sunday evening, September 1, 2007 at about 1856 hrs EDST the receiver at PopWireless HQ logged and recorded a radio transmission on 467.550 MHz. This is a frequency allocated to ships in other countries and is specifically not for use by these ships in the United States. Did they know that? A ship’s crewman asked the Boson to turn off his walkie talkie just as the ship began to pass PopularWireless HQ. (Hear the audio clip.)

The PRA FSI log contained the following entry, in part:

A number of ships passing close together this afternoon:

Liberia Niteroi, mmsi: 212105000 call sign P3MJ9, registered to Cyprus sailing to Newport News

The Texas, mmsi: 267594000, call sign LMWR3, from Norway. I think this is the ship just based on the accents of the sailors. That and my five element Yagi got a great signal pointed directly at the ship.

M/V Morning Melody, mmsi: 354047000, call sign 3EGS6, out of Panama

—————————————————

All were quiet as they sailed by and on at least one ship the Boson’s walkie talkie was off.

(Huntingtown, MD) It is possible to identify an in-transit ship as the most likely source of FSI (Foreign Shipping Interference) in the GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service.) Using an AIS - Automatic Identification System receiver and a directional antenna the signal from ship’s AIS transponder will tell you the ship’s name, it’s ITU MMSI registration, call sign, country of registration and destination. Using the MMSI look up at the ITU you can determine what company owns the ship.

On the Chesapeake Bay near Plum Point, MD the PopularWireless AIS receiver has so far identified three ships using GMRS channels while in US waters. Vessels from Norway, Vanuatu, and Singapore are currently on the Foreign Shipping Interference Log. The Norwegian vessel was docked and easily identified with a directional Yagi antenna at some twelve miles distant. The ships from Vanuatu and Singapore passed PopularWireless on the Chesapeake Bay and each was followed with the directional antenna as they sailed by.

The requirements are pretty simple but there is an investment in equipment. The first AIS receiver was an ICOM IC-R8500 receiver. A wide variety of inexpensive scanner receivers can be used as long as the one selected can be modified to take audio directly from the radio discriminator. The receiver was changed that to an SR-161 AIS receiver purchased for $189 from Milltech Marine. The power requirements are very low. An older three-amp power supply was used successfully. The antenna is a VHF antenna with LMR400 cable at about 60 feet above sea level and of course the higher the better. Use good low-loss feed line. The SR-161 serial data from is connected to a computer with Ship Plotter software installed. The switch to serial data from an audio feed to the sound card restored another analog audio input on the computer used for recording ship transmissions on the unauthorized channels also via the ICOM R-8500. The ShipPlotter software is about $30. The payment is processed in Europe so the price is up and down a bit based on the current exchange rate.

Using the ShipPlotter software you can super impose the ship on marine navigation charts or photographs from Google Earth. It is possible to zoom in on a chart to determine where a ship is berthed or moored. A bearing from the chart to your location can be compared to the bearing determined from the directional antenna. ShipPlotter has an active Yahoo Group where the program author and active users provide some support for users of the software. It is even possible for a group of licensees to create their own server and share local data using this product.

Now if you don’t have the cash to purchase an AIS receiver you can purchase the AIS software at Shipplotter.com and watch the feeds from various ports around the United States. There are many ShipPlotter users sending regular data on many US ports that a GMRS licensee could use to help identify Foreign Shipping Interference from a ship illegally using GMRS channels in US waters. Ports in Delaware, Virginia, Texas, California, Washington, and even the Great Lakes are covered. Licensees will also find that many other websites that display AIS ship data on line. Another good one is ShipPlotting.com.

Once the name and owner of the ship is known the GMRS licensee can attempt to contact the ship owner directly by email or mail. My first attempt to contact a ship owner in Singapore was unsuccessful. This did not surprise me given the lack of cooperation from ship’s Captains I have encountered on both coasts. Should the licensee be unsuccessful, a Personal Radio Association GMRS Interference form can be completed (available at PRAWEB.ORG) and sent to the FCC GMRS address in Gettysburg (See Part 95) directly or through the PRA along with the AIS data and the directional methods used to verify the source of the radio signals was the ship in question.

Licensees curious what ships are in or around the area of Southern Maryland can check the AIS Map of the Chesapeake Bay generated at PopularWireless HQ through the courtesy of Shipplotter AIS software and unique scripts written by Shipplotting.com.

At PopularWireless two ICOM-R8500’s and one RadioShack PRO-2006 monitor GMRS, FRS, and international shipping frequencies to assist in the identification of FSI. On any complaint audio files can be recorded and sent to the offending company as evidence. All three scanners are controlled by Spectrum Manager, a ScanStar product. Spectrum Manager is an outstanding product and is very useful for this purpose. A PC audio card conversion to the M-Audio Delta 1010LT purchased from SweetWater will allow recording up to eight computer controlled radio receivers.