How all started
I live by the river. Especially in summer time sitting at the terrace and seeing all this nice river cruise ships travelling by, it comes to my mind, that it could be interesting to know a little bit more about these ships. At this time I knew about the possibility of tracking live airplane positions, but for ships? Soon I also found some similar pages in the internet, where you can watch vessel positions – but my region wasn’t covered. So i investigated a little bit more time and I found the amazing blog http://www.rtl-sdr.com/. The blog is absolute fantastic; showing several different applications what can be done with a so called RTL-SDR dongle. So in august 2015 I created a first Android app for decoding AIS ship positions.