Open Blog on Digital-Seas

Today was a perfect suny day, with a calm Baltic Sea in the morning, but quiet a strong wind in the afternoon. Good conditions to leave the yard and go for a cruise on the open Sea. And what a challenge for a new build ship, which is supposed to cruise inland waterways like the Rhine and Danube.
It was nice to monitor all the manouvers of the crew with the help of Fleetmon and the playback of the day track. There will be more tests over the next days until the ship gets delivered in the end of June. What a pitty, I could not go out and shoot some images of the ship, but I will over the next days….

Detail-page of the vessel A-ROSA aqua:
http://www.digital-seas.com/vessel_search/vessel_details/on/a%20rosa%20aqua_q60300.html

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It is the break of the Champions League final, giving me some time for a note (hoping for Manus wake up):
(most of the fixes are related to the last week introduced complete new object-id for vessels)

[*] fixed missing links to detail pages from Fleetmon
[*] fixed 404 errors on symlinked pages
[*] fixed links inside global kml file

[+] added UTC arrival date on vessel detail page
[+] added the ever missing ETA entry on vessel detail page
[+] Added new Coverage Flag in Vessel-Lists
[+] building the grounds for the soon available stations statistics (coverage measuring)

[-] excluded around 300 AIS land stations from the archive listings (until a naming scheme has been defined)
[-] clean up of old vessel entries, with missing parameters (reduced list, around 700, today = 61.075 vessels)

Game is up again, we will concentrate on the bigger screen now….and thanks to all very active uploaders of this busy week !

our brave two years old server is going out of business on friday, which makes it necessary for sharers still using this server to change the IP to:
193.189.247.193 Port 33000

we have a video on this page, showing how to setup ShipPlotter with the correct sharing option, to send to the new Digital-Seas Sharing Server.
http://www.digital-seas.com/open_space/sharing_ais/sharing_howto_contributors.html

There are three sources still using the old IP, so if anybody is missing a signal from friday on, please let us know and check the settings in your SP program.

This monday brought many changes to the Site, we worked on over the last weeks.
They will solve issues of lost vessels Ids and missing assignments of images, our users reported.

[*] introduced complete new database and recieving scheme for AIS data
[+] extended evaluation of AIS types and messages (Class-B, Stations, SARs etc)

[*] adjusted all modules for new unique vessel ID
[+] Added new Coverage Flag in Vessel-Lists

[*] Vessel image thumbnail view updated.
[+] Added new Vessel Image Detail page.
[+] Added image alert on detail page.
[*] Fixed bug on URL redirect, leading to 404 pages for Users
[-] changed User page speaking URL (attention: bookmark adjustments could be neccs.)

Today is a big day for us, we will bring a completely remodeled database online.
We will try to keep the site running inbetween, in the best case you want notice the switch, in the worst, the site will not be available at all :-)
So please excuse any disturbances over the day, we are still working hard.
It was already hard work over the last weeks, what will this update approve? Speed, Class-B tracking, a multi level scheme for vessel identification (no unassigned records anymore) and the ground for feautures like zone alerts, port tracking and destination lists.
We will give you another report, when today works are finsihed.

Always good to talk about new Stations in the network covering more maritime areas. Over the last weeks we covered the ports of Lisboa in Portugal and closed some reception gaps on the river Weser with an Antenna in Bremen.  The Port of Antwerp is now covered with three stations to give you the track of vesel traffic for this long entrance.
A new antenna in Kiel will finish the last bit of the Kiel-Canal between Rendsburg and the Kieler Förde, coming next Weekend. Thanks to Jose, Stevo and Bernward and Bernd from Navkom (please use the links to visit their projects and companies).
We are welcome very much, every attempt to share AIS signals with DS, or open new antenna stations in regions worldwide.

We are working hard on the new database scheme, it will be released next week and brings blasting speed and much better reliability (known issues with overwritten data will be solved). We also extended the reading of the complete AIS set, to be open for Class-B and all other messages. It is fun to follow the SARs objects in real time (much faster then the ordinary ship)  :-)   We adjusted the start view of the vessel search to reflect the most actual changes in traffic. There is also a new flag for beeing inside the coverage right in the list.

I will fly to Istanbul tomorrow, to have meetings and will give you some impressions over the next days.

Thomas and me are planning a new DS database for a while, which will be able to add different kind of data around vessels, even ships, we haven’t tracked yet via AIS.
Also the new Fleetmon - client is in the works and better community features for the site. This will be a major step for this website and there is a lot of background work neccessary. Hope to see the results in May, we are trying hard (in our small amount of spare time). Done already is the rebuild of the Vessel Gallery, with photographers credits and comment options.

In between you could try the new comment feature for Vessel-Images, the option to flag images in question and the new counter of comments, shown in all Ship-thumbnails. We have extended our Forum and the Blog. Now it is possible, to upload or link images also in your posts / comments. This will make live easier for all of us, when talking about ship images.
I will use this new option to start a discussion with you, about image quality and workflow and hope for feedback. Have a nice sunday…. Lars

Over the last two weeks we opened new AIS stations on Digital-Seas to extend the coverage.
There are now Antennas in Harlingen-NL, Samothraki-GR, Wismar,DE and another part of the river Elbe right above Hamburg,DE connected.
Thanks to Sebastiaan, Ralf, Dennis and the port of Wismar.
We are now working on AIS tracking in Portugal and Spain and yes, a little bit more of the States :-)