| Shipplotter is a software developed by Bev M Ewen-Smith of the Portugal based COAA astronomy holiday centre. It is a very popular software in the AIS Receiving community because it is cheap and has many useful features which is why I call it a multi-tool. It is very good value for money as well, costing 25 euro plus VAT for personal use. You can download it and try it immediately but data sharing will not work unless you register it using your credit card. |
| The software can be used to decode the AIS data coming from a receiver or even it can decode AIS data using no receiver and only a VHF radio which is modified with discriminator out and using a sound card. For decoding the AIS data from an AIS receiver you do not need a sound card though, just a serial port. |
| Basically the AIS data comes out of a receiver as NMEA AIVDM sentences in the following format: |
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!AIVDM,1,1,,B,13RVkd0w011d<C`EeRlUAQAn080:,0*56
!AIVDM,1,1,,A,13TEaL0P001d>8lEePr00?wn080;,0*60
!AIVDM,1,1,,A,13T7jf?0001d=k@EeO3Foomn2@0E,0*19
!AIVDM,1,1,,A,13RVWv00001d<D@EeR56p6h2053H,0*7F |
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| Which needs decoding. Shipplotter does that. |
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| We can see the shipplotter screen above which is using a satellite map. The ships are all plotted on the screen automatically from AIS data. The satellite maps are the easiest to use as they can be loaded from the internet according to the area you are looking at on the screen, by pressing a button in shipplotter. |
| Then you can save them and assign each view to quick access buttons at the top of the screen. This is one way to use shipplotter but personally i do not like it. Especially if you are sharing data using the shipplotter share function, it freezes the program for a few seconds while it makes the sharing upload. |
| Let us have a look at the other basic functions of shipplotter. We have the vessel's view page where we see the list of vessels on our system. This is shown above. There is also a messages view were we can see the actual AIS messages in the order that they are being received. |
| More interesting for local viewing is that shipplotter presents a google earth server. |
| So you can see the ships in google earth. If you zoom in you can even see the outlines of the ships in correct dimensions and course. The screen will update according to what you set it to. I think the default is every 1 minute. Google Earth view is limited to the shiplotter screen view so you must zoom out in shipplotter when you are using it otherwise you will not see all the ships. |
| But that is not all, shipplotter has many options for input and output, most of the things that you might think of it does and that is why we use it. There are also ready scripts for publishing your data to your website like we do. |
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