I am a sailor . and have spent years sailing to about 64 countries, ( Now based at home and dont sail foreign much any more, ) A thought has crossed my mind , With as many deep sea ships crossing all the worlds oceans could a Tracking device be based on ships to get tracks and hits from Aircraft far off shore were the current home based ones have a limited range, , It would be interesting to try I think.
If you can sort out an uplink…
Oil rigs are a good bet though, more infrastructure in place there.
On Board most of the ships i have sailed on Including the one I sail on now , we have Satellite Up link ( Gyro stabilized ) , used for telephone / text and internet . for the most part they are better data transfers then a lot of shore d=based stations . . still would be interesting to try a test .
There’s a couple out in GOM on flightaware.com/adsb/coverage
There are AIS receivers installed on several ships that are up-linked to shore-based monitoring. As long as there is flat-rate satellite internet available, it’s technically no problem to do the same with ADSB. Just need the right connection to get the interested.
/M
I’m one of those sailors that will upload to FlightAware when ever I’m on board and have a reasonable uplink. It is actually how I started when I worked on a rig in the Danish Sector of the North Sea and wanted to see our crew change helicopters coming in.
Got a PP license from FA after I emailed them and got the dongle and antenna from Jetvision delivered to the heliport which got them flown to the rig. As we were located close to a Maersk gas platform internet wasn’t a problem there. As we were jacked up the and the antenna was on the bridge it was almost at 75meters which gave me a view of most of the North Sea.
Now I’m back to normal sailing as a Chief Officer, mostly in NW Europe and the Mediterranean and will have to do with 150Mb per day for internet but still try to upload via PP. Even got a an email from Bev from PP as he saw that my position was on the move from Ireland to Spain. As I move around a lot my basestation.sqb is now at 24k of planes with a lot of planes I normally wouldn’t see from my home in the Netherlands
I’m trying to make a portable PiAware now with GPS, only now trying to find a way to log in to the ships network to get my 150Mb per day. That would also allow me to take my laptop back to my cabin to watch some movies in my of time. But that will be some more tinkering during this leave.
Regards,
Neal
sounds great , keep me informed .
If they can do this… marinetraffic.com/en/ais/ho … :29/zoom:4
They can do an ADSB System
Thanks for the link! I have to make a selfish plug for my other addiction.
Luckily, I live on the coast. I have a station sending data to marinetraffic.com and have enjoyed optimizing it as much or possibly more than FlightAware! It seems to take a little more to maximize reception from the ships with their limited range!
I had this exact thought while listening to a podcast about MH370. Surely one of the large shipping companies would have someone that would want to try this out. There’s 70% of the earths surface that doesn’t have good coverage. This should change especially since conditions for tracking would be the best on a ship.
Antenna up high, check
No landscape to block signals, check
Some sort of existing data connection, I assume this is the case.