AIS Reception

Contents

1 What is AIS? .......................................................................................................................................... 2

1.1 How is it sent over the radio? ....................................................................................................... 2
1.2 AIS NMEA Sentences ..................................................................................................................... 2
2 Connecting to Radio .............................................................................................................................. 3
2.1 Traditional Radios ......................................................................................................................... 3
2.2 Software Defined Radio (SDR) ...................................................................................................... 3
3 Selecting AIS mode................................................................................................................................ 4
4 Using with Mapping Applications ......................................................................................................... 5
4.1 SARTrack ....................................................................................................................................... 5
4.2 Most other APRS Applications ...................................................................................................... 7
4.3 OpenCPN ....................................................................................................................................... 8
4.4 Display APRS on OpenCPN .......................................................................................................... 13

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1 What is AIS?

AIS is an international tracking system for ships. Messages can contain position, speed, course, name,
destination, status, dimensions, and many other types of information.

1.1 How is it sent over the radio?

AIS uses VHF FM Marine Radio channels:

 87B 161.975 MHz

 88B 162.025 MHz

The radios use 25 kHz channel spacing with a peak deviation of ±5 kHz. AIS uses HDLC over 9600 bps
GMSK. It is very much like our ham radio 9600 bps G3RUH style transmission.

Located about 50 km from the ocean, I’m able to hear a few ships with an ordinary 2 meter ham
transceiver and a vertical antenna on the roof.

1.2 AIS NMEA Sentences

AIS receivers produce NMEA style sentences which are sent to other devices. These are much like the
sentences you see from a GPS receiver. Instead of starting with something like $GPRMC, it starts
with !AIVDM instead. A typical sentence might look like:

!AIVDM,1,1,,A,15N4cJ`000rrjq@H@0i2hbuN0L0U,0*31

 The talker and sentence type.

 A couple fields we don’t care about here.
 A bit vector represented as a printable character for each group of 6 bits.
 A checksum at the end.

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2 Connecting to Radio

This will not work with the audio from your receiver’s speaker!!! Don’t waste your time trying.

For proper decoding, about 5kHz of audio bandwidth is required. Like 9600 bps AX.25, this will not work
with the speaker connection because the audio processing stages distort the signal too much.

You need to get the audio signal from the FM discriminator before the de-emphasis and other audio
processing make it useless for this purpose.

2.1 Traditional Radios

Some Ham Radio VHF transceivers have a special connector for use with external modems. The big 3
Japanese manfacturers (Kenwood, Icon, Yaesu) all standardized on the same 6 pin round mini-DIN
connector. Radios with the 6 pin round connector provide this signal. Some Alinco models have the
same signals available but the connector is physically different.

The connector is often labeled “data” but it is really audio for an external modem. There are two
receive audio signals:

 Narrow bandwidth good for 1200 bps packet, SSTV, etc.

 Wide audio bandwidth, reasonably flat out to 5 kHz, good for 9600 bps.

You need to use the latter. The other distorts the signal too much to be usable.

2.2 Software Defined Radio (SDR)

Software Defined Radios can also be used. The Dire Wolf User Guide has details on usage with popular
software such as

 Gqrx
 rtl_fm
 SDR#
 Gnu Radio

The one thing you must remember is the audio bandwidth. It must be fairly flat out to 5kHz. Be sure
that an de-emphasis or other audio filtering is disabled.

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3 Selecting AIS mode

There are two different ways to select a modem.

 For the first, or only, radio channel, the “-B” (upper case B) command line option can be used to
specify the speed.
 In a multiple radio setup, you would need to use the MODEM command in the configuration file.

A suitable modem is selected for the given speed. This defaults to 1200 AFSK but other values, such as
9600 G3RUH style, are possible when using APRS/Packet Radio. AIS also uses 9600 bps so a special case
was added. Instead of a number, the characters “AIS” are used.

Example:

direwolf -B AIS -r 48000 -T "%H:%M:%S"

 "-B" sets the speed. 9600 is for ham radio AX.25 G3RUH. A special case was added for AIS.
 "-r" sets the audio sample rate. 44100 is the default. I found that 48000 can provide a slight
benefit for 9600 bps.
 "-T" adds a time stamp.

If all goes well, you should see some lines similar to this:

[0.3 08:51:47] AIS>APDW16:{DA!AIVDM,1,1,,A,15N4cJ`000rrjq@H@0i2hbuN0L0U,0*31

Let’s break this down:

 [0.3 08:51:47]

Receiving channel and timestamp.

 AIS>APDW16:

The ship identifier won’t fit in the source address field so “AIS” is there to indicate the
origin. The destination field indicates the software doing the reception.

 {DA

An information part beginning with “{“ indicates user defined data. D and A indicate
Dire Wolf and AIS.

 !AIVDM,1,1,,A,15N4cJ`000rrjq@H@0i2hbuN0L0U,0*31

This is what you would get out of a normal AIS receiver. It is similar to the NMEA
sentences from a GPS receiver.

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4 Using with Mapping Applications

Dire Wolf generates NMEA sentences like those from a normal AIS receiver. Looking at them is not
much fun for most people. You probably want to feed this information into some sort of mapping
application.

4.1 SARTrack

The Connections panel has a special button for connecting to the Dire Wolf TNC.

SARTtrack recognizes the APRS information fields starting with “{DA” and knows how to decode the AIS
sentences.

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Move your mouse pointer over a ship to see more details.

APRS and AIS can be viewed on a single map without any special configuration required.

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4.2 Most other APRS Applications

At the time this is being written, I’m not aware of any other APRS applications that know how to decode
the AIS sentences. For applications, such as APRSISCE/32, YAAC, PinPoint APRS, Xastir, etc. Dire Wolf
can translate AIS positions into normal APRS Object Reports.

Simply add the “-A” (upper case A) option to the direwolf command line. Example:

direwolf -B AIS -r 48000 -T "%H:%M:%S" -A

 "-A" causes AIS position reports to be converted to APRS Object Reports.

With this method less detailed information will be available because other types of AIS messages will
not be converted.

Applications can connect to the Dire Wolf TNC in a variety of ways. Modern applications allow
connection to a TNC over the network. The TNC and application(s) using it can be on different
computers.

 AGW network protocol, default TCP port 8000.

 Network KISS, default TCP port 8001.

For older applications, that only know how to talk to a hardware TNC over a serial port, the Linux version
provides a “pseudo terminal” which is a virtual serial port with a KISS TNC on the other side.

Windows does not have similar functionality built in so it takes a little more effort to do the same thing.
The User Guide describes the use of “comocom” to create a pair of virtual serial ports, connected to
each other with a “null modem” cable.

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4.3 OpenCPN

Open Chart Plotter Navigation (OpenCPN) is designed specifically for use a on a boat. Naturally, it knows
how to decode AIS sentences but it doesn’t know anything about packet radio TNCs or APRS or KISS
protocols. We need to communicate with it in a different way.

Install OpenCPN, then download and install some charts, as detailed here:

https://opencpn.org

Select Options > Connections, then click “Add Connection” in the lower pane:

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Select:

 Network
 UDP

Address does not matter so it can be left as 0.0.0.0.

Make note of the dataport number because we will need this later. 2947 appeared as the default so we
will use that here.

Ensure that “Receive Input on this Port” is checked.

Click OK.

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Edit the direwolf.conf configuration file and add a line, similar to one of these depending on whether
you want to use a specific IP address or a hostname where OpenCPN is running. Use the same UDP
port number from the OpenCPN connections.

WAYPOINT 192.168.12.34:2947 A

WAYPOINT localhost:2947 A

The “A” at the end is very important. It means that AIS NMEA sentences should be sent.

Run direwolf in the usual way, with the “-B AIS” command line option.

direwolf -B AIS -r 48000 -T "%H:%M:%S"

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Here we see a ship represented by a green triangle. Mousing over the icon will produce details.

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Right click on the icon and pick “Target List…” to get a list of ships.

As mentioned earlier, I’m about 50 km from the coast and this doesn’t seem to be a very good radio day
with only one ship currently displayed.

My current location is not known to the application so I had to supply a very large Limit Range to see
anything listed here.

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4.4 Display APRS on OpenCPN

I happened to stumble across something interesting under Options > Ships > AIS Targets.

It seems there is a limited ability to display information, from APRS, by the use of $GPWPL waypoint
location sentences. Waypoints are meant to be stationary points, along a route, so it’s a bit of a kludge
to repurpose them for multiple types of moving objects.

Some Kenwood transceivers, the Dire Wolf software TNC, and perhaps others, can translate received
APRS Positions and Objects into NMEA sentences for display on GPS receivers and other mapping
applications.

The sentences available are:

$GPWPL - NMEA generic with only location and name.

$PGRMW - Garmin, adds altitude, symbol, and comment
to previously named waypoint.
$PMGNWPL - Magellan, more complete for stationary objects.
$PKWDWPL - Kenwood with APRS style symbol but missing comment.

Any combination of these can be generated by adding corresponding letters to the WAYPOINT
command in the Dire Wolf configuration file.

Sentence Origin
Config Name Location Altitude Speed Symbol Comment
file &
option Course
$GPWPL APRS N  
$PGRMW APRS G  *   
$PMGNWPL APRS M     
$PKWDWPL APRS K     
!AIVDM AIS A      
* = $PGRMW adds additional attributes to a waypoint with same name.

Example, when receiving APRS:

WAYPOINT localhost:2947 N

This will send a $GPWPL sentence each time an APRS Position or Object Report is received.

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The feature works but it is not very satisfying when looking at APRS stations on land. The maps
(“charts”) are designed for navigating near the coast and don’t have inland features.

All of the stations show up as a square because $GPWPL does not have provision for a symbol.
($PKWDWPL would have been a much better choice!) Names are displayed when the mouse pointer
hovers over the icon.

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