· Brandon Keepers · Tutorial · 2 min read
Running a Roaming AIS Station
Use Signal K to report your position—and everyone else’s nearby—to online services like MarineTraffic and VesselFinder.
If you are in a well-populated area, you may notice that the position of your vessel on global tracking sites like MarineTraffic or VesselFinder is often updated in near-real-time. This is thanks to a network of AIS stations that relay the positions of vessels to these services. You can join this network by running a roaming AIS station on your boat, which will report your position and the positions of nearby vessels.
Why Run a Roaming AIS Station?
- 📍 Track your own boat: view your real-time position on marine traffic websites and share it with friends and family.
- 🆘 Improve safety at sea: your roaming station may help relay the AIS position of vessels in distress in remote areas.
- 🎁 Unlock perks: services like MarineTraffic offer premium benefits to AIS data partners.
What You’ll Need
To set up a roaming AIS station, you’ll need to already have Signal K server running on your boat. Check out the Getting Started with Signal K documentation and install it on your boat. You can run Signal K on a Raspberry Pi, a laptop, or any other computer that can connect to the internet and instruments on your boat.
To report the position of boats besides your own, you’ll also need an AIS receiver and a connection to your Signal K server. If you do have AIS but it’s not yet connected to Signal K, check out the documentation on connecting Signal K to your NMEA network. If you don’t have AIS, there are some low cost AIS receivers that can simply be connected via USB to the computer running Signal K. https://www.tindie.com/products/astuder/daisy-2-dual-channel-ais-receiver-with-nmea-0183/
Setting Up Your Roaming AIS Station
Once you have the prerequisites in place, setting up your roaming AIS station is shockingly simple (as with many things in Signal K).
- Install one of the following plugins:
- If you have an AIS onboard, install the ais-forwarder, which will forward your position and all AIS traffic.
- If you don’t have an AIS onboard, install the aisreporter plugin, which will at least report your position.
- Sign up for accounts with AIS reporting services:
- Configure the plugin with the IP and ports provided by the AIS reporting services
That’s it—your boat is now a roaming station that automatically reports AIS data, enhancing global coverage and making us all a little safer.
