Thank You all,

We here (Salvador/BA-Brazil) are trying to understand a bit more about
AIS. I have instaled the Sea Clear free program and I was surprised to
see that it is a very good program, suporting AIS and using the
G7ToWin for download/upload, can use BSB and scanned charts (we have
the OziExplorer from many years).

A friend here had instaled the Ship Plotter demo software and made a
test with his Icom Ham Radio and it worked very well: he gets about 20
ships here in Salvador/BA using a VHF antena instaled in the roof of
his apartment building (very high) and plotted ships up to 20 nm from
his home.

The Ship Plotter sends information to Ozi (we do not know how)
wich displays the ships as Map Features. We are having trouble in
making it works with a standard marine VHF reciever, so he is buying a
NASA black box Receiver for his boat and will use it with his laptop
and Sea Clear.

In my turn, I have a laptop too, with several othres navigation
softwares but I think that it is a cumbersome thing in my boat, so I am
waiting that Garmin unveils soon the AIS function for my GpsMap276C, or
I will buy the NASA stand alone AIS.

If the NASA with display would have a NMEA out interface too, like the
black box model, so I could use it as well with the laptop too, I
would have already buy it now.

In another forum (discution list) someone made the folowing coment to
my entry:

" Then I think you schould start reading again."
"All DCS capable Garmin receivers are also AIS capable.
DCS is still the most wideley spread system, and AIS does not add
anything to Garmin GPS receivers over the DCS system."
"You can easely combine a Garmin with DCS with a AIS reciever since the

data send to the (external) gps is exactly the same."


This make me think that, maybe Garmin is developing the 3006/3010/276C
software for AIS support and the Garmin Network could receive another
Garmin "sensor" member: a black box AIS receiver wich could be a AIS
receiver only (GAR20?) for the poor and a AIS receiver/transponder
(GAR40?) for the rich.

Off course, this is my pure speculation, and dream ...

Regards

Pascal
S 13 00/W 038 27