-Name Withheld For Security Concerns wrote in
:



How many people here think AIS is a good idea?

If it saves one sailor's life, if it saves one ship from a collision, it's
got my vote. The ability to see the ship in the channel around that bend
up ahead on a busy waterway, alone, is more than enough incentive to have
it.

It just seems like
jack-booted thuggary to require it on the bigger boats.

The ONLY way to get a shipping company to install anything that doesn't
make a direct profit, regardless of its safety-at-sea function, is to make
it MANDATORY. Ships sometimes seem "disposable" to them. We also require
them to have certain other safety equipments, like lifeboats. That's
thuggery, too. Compliance is the only way to get it installed in a
reasonable length of time on the fleets.


Me's be thinkin thar be some mighty happy pirates.


I've thought of that, too. What a great way for terrorists to target a
ship, having all this information about it right on their laptops. The
pirates know where the ships are and when they leave, anyways. It's
published in the newspaper in Charleston and doesn't seem to be a problem.

We'll install the receiving system on Lionheart when it's delivered. The
transponder will come, once shipping has their $4000 units and prices drop
to something reasonable for a low-powered VHF FM transceiver and a ROM-
based modem the hams have had for years. This system is a modification of
APRS, Automatic Packet Reporting System, invented by Bob Bruninga, WB4APR,
at the Naval Academy. He let the hams have it and it's really neat.

AIS' ability to time slot, not just broadcast in the blind, is a vast
improvement. Time slot is what your cellphone does to share channels with
other cellphones. The cellphone has more digital technology than AIS at a
much higher frequency, with much more miniturization. It sells for $250,
which I figure would be a fair price for an AIS transponder that didn't
have a display, just a NMEA 0183/NMEA-whatever-is-new data output jack so
we can see the AIS targets on the various chartplotters/radar displays we
already have installed in the boats' networks. The pleasure boat market
for AIS is much larger than the APRS market for hams, so this price point
should be doable. Of course, boaters will be paying double or triple this
price because it will be a "marine" unit from your local marine ripoff
theives....just like their plumbing parts.

When these units become available at more reasonable prices, every yacht
not engaged in drug smuggling should get one. Your little worthless radar
reflector's blip on the containership's radar is NOTHING compared to your
yacht showing up as a HARD target with all that information on the bridge
of the containership's AIS system. How great that will be....instead of
being run down in the middle of the night, of course.

Price 'em cheap and make 'em mandatory for EVERY boat that leaves the
harbor for sea is a great idea.....and make them RUN them all the time.
Sure would make the ship's watches a lot easier.