Category: AIS

AIS Share – RTL AIS Driver

Android Marine AIS System

AIS Share + RTL AIS Driver

Turn a modern Android phone or tablet into a live dual-channel AIS receiver with elegant onboard sharing to charting apps over Wi-Fi.
Plug in an RTL-SDR dongle, press Play in AIS Share, and forward vessel targets to OpenCPN, Navionics Boating, Boat Beacon, and other NMEA 0183 compatible apps.

No cloud. No monthly fee. No dedicated marine black box required.

Dual-channel AIS UDP + TCP sharing GPS forwarding Polar Range Chart Unique Vessel Count

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Categorized as AIS

RTL SDR AIS RECEIVER

WHAT IS IT ?

It is an Android app / application that decodes AIS messages transmitted by ships via radio using a cheap USB DVB-T / RTL-SDR stick.

AIS messages are transmitted over VHF.
Channel A: 161.975 MHz
Channel B: 162.025 MHz.
The app decodes both channels simultaneously.

This application does not need an internet connection, it decodes the received messages in real time.
This is a true standalone full featured AIS receiver.

The received messages are translated into NMEA0183 strings which can then be forwarded via UDP or TCP streaming to third party applications, PC programs or other devices.
Such applications can, for example, display the received AIS data on a map together with information about the received objects.

Please note: The app needs additional (very cheap) hardware to receive the radio signals.

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Is App XY compatible with AIS Share

Many users ask if charting application XY is compatible with AIS Share.
In principle, any third party application that supports AIS messages via UDP or TCP should be compatible.

To easily test such a connection there is a debug/test mode implemented in AIS Share. In this mode you can test the communication at home without having to connect the USB dongle.

In this article I will show you how to configure it for popular charting applications.

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AIS Receiver Shopping Guide

What’s needed

What is necessary to build an cheap 2 channel AIS receiver with your Android phone, tablet, TV-Box.

In this post I will show you buying links to components like USB Cable, RTL-SDR Dongle, Antenna.

Estimate total costs from 15€ to 40€ with good hardware components from Aliexpress. Could be the half if you already have some components.

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Practical Boat Owner Test AIS Share

David Berry from Practical Boat Owner shows how to make an AIS receiver with an Android Phone or Tablet and a RTL-SDR.com dongle. He use AIS Share to stream data to Boat Beacon a very popular chart navigation app. In his article he provides information about the technical background of AIS( automatic information system) and he is describing how he build a cheap AIS Receiver with a RTL-SDR Dongle and my App. The full article was issued in the February 2019 edition. https://www.pbo.co.uk/publication/pbo/february-2019

A similar tutorial on setting up AIS Share and Boat Beacon can be found here, or here https://ebctech.eu/is-app-xy-compatible-with-ais-share/

Or just watch my YouTube video about AIS SHARE and BoatBeacon

Using AIS Share and OpenCPN on sailboat

How all started

I live by the river. Especially in the summertime, when I sit on my terrace and watch all those beautiful river cruise ships go by, I think it would be interesting to know a little bit more about them. At the time, I already knew about the possibility of tracking the position of aeroplanes live, but for ships? I soon found a couple of similar sites on the internet where you could follow the positions of ships – but my region wasn’t covered. So I did some more research and found the amazing blog http://www.rtl-sdr.com/. The blog is absolutely fantastic; it shows several different applications of what can be done with a so-called RTL-SDR dongle. So in August 2015 I created my first Android app for decoding AIS ship positions.

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