Live ships map • Hacker News Board

Re: Live ships map

#31

Post by ruethewhirled » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 12:42 AM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #10

ruethewhirled wrote: post #5

This is very cool. Great tool for Somalian pirates too? edit. Ahh never mind they don't seem to have any data on the east coast of Africa

They don't have any data for the east coast of Africa because there probably aren't any receivers setup to receive AIS signals in that area.

Yeah after reading the FAQ I came to the same conclusion. But also realized that pirates wouldn't actually need this site and could just get their own AIS receiver's

Re: Live ships map

#32

Post by genkaos » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 12:58 AM UTC

Somehow related:

http://www.localizatodo.com/mapa/

Re: Live ships map

#33

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 1:09 AM UTC

b_emery wrote: post #28

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me want to buy a bunch of AIS receivers and take a week or two off to travel to far flung locations to setup remote receiving locations. Nerd level: Extreme Bonus points that you cite Calculated Risk blog.

This makes me want to buy a bunch of AIS receivers and take a week or two off to travel to far flung locations to setup remote receiving locations. We've been putting them at our HF radar sites to log ship data, so that we can use the ship data in a hack to get the radars to self calibrate. The radars measure ocean currents and are in some pretty 'far flung locations'. Yes it's fun!

Volunteer positions? =)

Re: Live ships map

#34

Post by cpeterso » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 1:11 AM UTC

ruethewhirled wrote: post #5

This is very cool. Great tool for Somalian pirates too? edit. Ahh never mind they don't seem to have any data on the east coast of Africa

I see business opportunities for marinetraffic.com to offer higher resolution/precision maps to paying customer. ;)

Re: Live ships map

#35

Post by arebop » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 1:31 AM UTC

I've been using http://www.boatingsf.com/ais_map.php and I like this better because (1) it's not flash and (2) your dataset is slightly more detailed.

I do miss boatingsf's animations, because it gives me a better idea about the path and trajectory of a ship than just a current position and heading.

Re: Live ships map

#36

Post by chrissnell » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 4:11 AM UTC

Neat, but http://aprs.fi has had this for years. Live cars map, too. :)

Re: Live ships map

#37

Post by apaprocki » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 5:09 AM UTC

At Bloomberg, we provide the same live vessel position via the BMAP function on the terminal mainly so that oil / natural gas traders can monitor and speculate commodities flows based on ship traffic and reported contents of ships. Someone posted a screenshot on this Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Investing/What-are-the-coolest-function...

It is definitely fun to play around with. Similar tools are provided to slice/dice the data to look at all the vessels which match particular criteria.

Similarly, all the data for positions of critical infrastructure (refineries, oil pipelines, power plants, etc) are provided as well as live storm tracking information so traders can determine if natural disasters will affect particular sectors or companies.

Re: Live ships map

#38

Post by apaprocki » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 5:31 AM UTC

ruethewhirled wrote: post #5

This is very cool. Great tool for Somalian pirates too? edit. Ahh never mind they don't seem to have any data on the east coast of Africa

I just checked on the Bloomberg, and we have data for ships off of Somalia.. so it definitely exists:

http://imgur.com/fZslp

Re: Live ships map

#39

Post by bcl » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 6:09 AM UTC

If you want to parse the AIS serial data you can use my AISparser project - https://github.com/bcl/aisparser

Re: Live ships map

#40

Post by bcl » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 6:11 AM UTC

ggchappell wrote: post #3

Very nice, but I had to wonder why, of the thousands of ships whose positions are recorded, only 2 appear to be any significant distance from land. The answer is in the FAQ [1]: > The MarineTraffic system does not cover all the seas of the world, but only specific coastal areas where a land-based AIS receiver is installed. [1] http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/faq.aspx?level1=160#16

The AIS transmissions are VHF (162MHz) so they are fairly short range, although with high gain antennas you can extend it a bit (with a corner reflector I once had intermittent data from a ship 600nm away).