Tracking Ships from Home with AIS and RTL-SDR

Have you ever lived near a port and found yourself wondering what’s going on out there on the water?

That was exactly my case, so I decided to dive in and find out. I bought a second RTL-SDR dongle and set it up with a dedicated antenna for AIS reception.

The range isn’t amazing when the weather’s bad, but on clear days it’s more than enough to track plenty of vessels around my area.

I’m running docker-shipfeeder, a great containerized setup that automatically receives AIS signals and shares them with community data hubs.

You can even see my live feed here: aiscatcher.org/station/1664.