How to submit AIS position reports as a Reporting Station

The sites like Marinetraffic, VesselFinder, and others collect position information from shore stations and satellites to populate their database. They encourage shore stations to report by giving free memberships. If you are interested in helping get more position information, your boat can become a shore station if you have AIS, an internet connection and PC or Predictwind Datahub to transmit the information.

First, decide how many sites you want to report to. Marinetraffic is a good choice as they will give a free professional subscription if your station has a high uptime for the preceding 3 months, but there are lots of other sites as well (vesselfinder, AIShub, . In each case, you will need to create a user id and create a station. The station will be assigned an IP address and a port number for reporting, it is this information that links the data you send to your account. 

For a PC, you will need to download the program AISDIspatcher (https://www.aishub.net/ais-dispatcher) and configure it. On the input tab, you need to provide the IP address of the source of AIS data from your boat network, on the output tab, you will provide the IP address and port number assigned by the site you are reporting to.  The example below is the configuration on Gemeaux, please don’t use these specific port numbers.

For Datahub, go to the NEMA tab and select “Internet AIS”. You want to enable “AIS to the Internet” and select “Custom” to define where you want to send your AIS data. You will enter the IP and port as a single entry in the form of 144.76.105.244:2635 (IP address:port number). The screenshot is the datahub setup on Gemeaux, your IP address and port numbers will be different.

You are now a reporting station!

An example of Gemeaux’s reporting page on Marine Traffic.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/stations/25719/_:222d337bd7552064084d306783d0e314