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.