This week I am extensively RTFMing. Technogeekery is moving ever rapidly forward, and the world of marine/maritime gadgetery is no exception. A few years ago (OK, in the late 1980s) The Big Thing in the marine world was the expanding use of radar (as it’s an acronym, shouldn’t we write it as ‘RADAR’?).
Anyway.
Radar (I’ll write it as if it’s a word) was rapidly adopted by the military and professional civilian marine/maritime users because it informed of hazards or potential hazards, such as vessels nearby on a converging course, vessels nearby that might be fishing, trawling, or involved in diving operations and – this was a keen selling point to leisure mariners – radar could also identify ‘hidden’ dangers such as marine farms, lobster pots, etc.
The downside with radar for non-professional civilian users was the cost. It was mind-bogglingly expensive to buy and power-draining to run. For these reasons the take-up was slow. For people with small/medium yachts, the power drain weighed as heavily as the initial purchase price. If you’re on your 32′ yacht and silently cruising towards Latin America, accompanied by the gentle swish of water against the hull of your boat, while a pod of 25-30 whistling and clicking dolphins accompany you by day, and as you revel in the spectacularly beautiful surface bioluminescence by night, you don’t want to be running your engine every few hours just to charge up your batteries because the constant use of radar is emptying them, do you? Well no, of course you don’t. You may as well sell your yacht and buy a motor cruiser (good luck getting one of those refuelled in the middle of the South Atlantic).
Lately though, radar units have come down in price and, at much the same time, power consumption has improved. So too has solar power capabilities which, coupled with the consumption improvement has made radar a much more attractive proposition to the non-professional mariner.
Are you trying to tell us that you’ve bought radar for Good Mood, I hear you ask? Well… No. You see, there’s a new(ish) kid on the block.
AIS (or Automatic Identification System for short) came into general use in the early 2000s, so it’s about 20 years old. While it is optional for leisure vessels to have an AIS transceiver, it’s a mandatory requirement for all working vessels. This doesn’t mean to say that some trawlers who might be operating in areas where they shouldn’t be (e.g. poaching) might switch their AIS transceivers off. But the reported instances of that sort of thing are small. Early AIS transceivers had dated displays; they looked like not very clever teletext readouts. That too has changed, modern AIS readouts show all manner of helpful information in a user-friendly format. You can see a PC-version of AIS here (it’s a bit like FlightRadar24, but for boats). There is a Marine Traffic app, based on AIS data, for mobile devices.
Until recently AIS was very expensive but, as with radar, it too has come down in price, and the power drain is not a significant factor. So yes, I’ve got an AIS transceiver. This week I will be configuring the AIS transceiver, and pairing it with the chartplotter, and doing all this wonderful geekery from the comfort of my own home.
That’s magic!
An interesting read. Thank you Paul Daniels… or was it Selwyn Froggit?
In the Ham world we have APRS, which performs a similar function. Check out aprs.fi
That’s a very interesting website, thanks. I’ll file it away (even though I don’t know what use it would be to me).