Open Blog on Digital-Seas

[+] new AIS antenna: Maledives, Malé
[+] new AIS antenna: Portugal, Lisbon
[+] new AIS antenna: USA, Jacksonville, Florida
[*] stronger, more reliable AIS stations in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg

… and many more to come in the next weeks, watch out!

[+] new Live Reports feature: Quickly report on ship accidents, irregularities and events of common interest! Let the world now what’s going on in just a second. Report positions outside AIS coverage. It’s twittering for Digital Seas!
[+] new “DS Vessel Search” plugin for Firefox: search for vessels like you do on Google!
[*] improved overall image quality, sorting out wrongly assigned images with the help of our tirelessly working Image Admin team
[*] improved member profile page: all contributions in a single compact view

Ship spotters at work in Antwerp! Our esteemed Digital Seas member Stevo kindly organized and hosted a ship spotters’ weekend and Digital Seas user meeting during the Tall Ship Race from July 9th to 10th. 24 people met on board the MONTIS 10 in Terneuzen to pursue their love for ships.

Ship spotters at work.

After a 10-hour trip from Rostock to Terneuzen and a much too warm night at the hotel Lars and I were excited about the things to come. Saturday was a pleasantly warm and sunny day. The ship spotters joining us on board came from Britain, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Cold drinks, sunscreen, good conversation and an incredible close-up view of the large and small vessels passing the MONTIS made for a relaxed and enjoyable trip where new friendships grew. In the evening we had ribs and tasted some Belgian beer specialties with Stevo and Ian. Rob joined us the next day for breakfast and we talked about future plans for Digital Seas. Lars and I returned with many good photos, new friends and a decent sunburn.

Thanks you very much Stevo! It was a great time. See you next year - at the latest!

Some photos and videos from the weekend:

Steven Oppeel
Fred Vloo (YouTube Video)

Today we crossed the amount of over 8400 ships in permanent AIS coverage (real time streams), which is also produced by new antennas established over the last week.
The busy port of Kiel right at the end of the Kiel-Kanal, which is connecting North and Baltic Sea, is covered now by Digital-Seas. With the help of Bernward at www.kielmonitor.de we now have a wide view from the tower of a high church, spanning almost 40sm radius.
A bit farer located  in the East of Germany is the city of Wolgast. The small town has a larger yard, where cruiseships and military vessels are produced. The Antenna there is catching traffic up to the border to Poland.

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.

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 :-)

just to give you a short update on our developments in the new year 2009:

commons:
more then 20.000 Users registered,
more then 50.000 vessel entries in the database,
more then 10.000 vessels with over 20.000 image-uploads,
new AIS Sources every month (Malmoe, Helsinki, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Dover, Athens)
new global AIS vessel traffic - KML with our complete coverage is now available,

content:
restructure of menue: Tracking/Regions to reflect new AIS sources,
permanent up to date overview of our AIS coverage,
new topic in forum section regarding image copyrights,
brand new sharing server, new webserver,
loads of code fixing in the website and the AIS section of the site,
lots of conversations to possible partners,

Please let us know in the Forum Section about your experiences and whishes with Digital-Seas.
(or comment right here :-)

Thanks to all of the users,
great cheers to our sharers and
all the best for the new Year 2009!

Trying to produce a better understanding when explaining AIS, I have to come up with some visuals also.
So here are the first results. There will be another final version.
Let me know about any comment :-)

We have a nice coverage from a sharer in Livorno (thanks for that), without getting a ring or message from him. Since I really would like to include this area on a constant basis, please give me a short reply about the setup.
Saluti a Italia !