I'm actually serving data to marinetraffic.com from a receiver near Point Conception, California. The AIS broadcasts in the VHF band so it's basically line of site, plus a bit more because of various scattering effects. We have a receiver on Santa Cruz Island at about 750 ft elevation that gets AIS signals from ships off Mexico (when the conditions are right) - way beyond the quoted range.

The amount of shipping along even our small section of coast boggles the mind. There's a seasonal signal to it also. See [1] for example.

[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/10/la-port-traffic-in...

For those that are not aware, this is crowd sourced aggregation of data received by AIS (Automatic Identification System) VHF receivers which are hosted by volunteers who put up a receiver, antenna, and send the data received from the ships to this site.

At Bloomberg, we provide the same live vessel position via the BMAP function on the terminal mainly so that oil / natural gas traders can monitor and speculate commodities flows based on ship traffic and reported contents of ships. Someone posted a screenshot on this Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Investing/What-are-the-coolest-function...

It is definitely fun to play around with. Similar tools are provided to slice/dice the data to look at all the vessels which match particular criteria.

Similarly, all the data for positions of critical infrastructure (refineries, oil pipelines, power plants, etc) are provided as well as live storm tracking information so traders can determine if natural disasters will affect particular sectors or companies.

Very nice, but I had to wonder why, of the thousands of ships whose positions are recorded, only 2 appear to be any significant distance from land. The answer is in the FAQ [1]:

> The MarineTraffic system does not cover all the seas of the world, but only specific coastal areas where a land-based AIS receiver is installed.

[1] http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/faq.aspx?level1=160#16

There are a lot of tankers sitting off the coasts. I wonder if they are holding oil that was delivered to speculators, awaiting sale?

I have some friends who do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTE9Gr0ZmOc

I bet they would love this app.

This is very cool. Great tool for Somalian pirates too?

edit. Ahh never mind they don't seem to have any data on the east coast of Africa

If you want to parse the AIS serial data you can use my AISparser project - https://github.com/bcl/aisparser

This site is really cool. Everyone interested in this sort of tracking should checkout PlanePlotter from COAA http://www.coaa.co.uk/planeplotter.htm. It does a similar sort of thing but for planes which have ADS-B transmitters and a team of volunteers sharing data. It costs 25 euros to access the shared data but well worth the money (I'm not affiliated just a happy customer).

Wow, really cool. My apartment overlooks Vancouver harbour and I can see every ship thats on the map.

Am I the only one who searched for the Steve Irwin?

It really needs a shaded overlay or similar that shows the coverage regions. If you don't know that a patch of sea isn't being monitored, it's not exactly reliable data.

I live near the "oil capital of Europe" (I hate that name too), so there's quite a lot of ships floating around nearby. Very cool.

I've been using http://www.boatingsf.com/ais_map.php and I like this better because (1) it's not flash and (2) your dataset is slightly more detailed.

I do miss boatingsf's animations, because it gives me a better idea about the path and trajectory of a ship than just a current position and heading.

I built an app that combines freely available AIS data with other relevant inventory data and sell subscriptions to some local oil-spill recovery companies: http://demo.dedicatedmaps.com/

I use this to track the ships my sister works on. Awesome resource :)

Wow. Notice the complete lack of anything around North Korea.

This is great, I live near one of the biggest ports in Australia. Great to be able to identify the ships I can see from my house.

Neat, but http://aprs.fi has had this for years. Live cars map, too. :)

Cool! FlightAware for boat traffic.

Somehow related:

http://www.localizatodo.com/mapa/

They also have a great iPhone app.

Extremely cool!

I have aggregated some of the other similar sources for vessel tracking:-

http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml http://www.mariweb.gr/ecs http://www.vesseltracker.com/app http://vesseltrax.com/ http://www.shippingexplorer.net/en http://www.fleetmon.com/ http://www.shiptracking.eu/ais/ http://www.worldvtsguide.org/index.html

Similarly live air traffic from around the world is aggregated and it uses ADS-B technique to receive flight information from aircraft:-

http://www.radarvirtuel.com/ http://www.flightradar24.com/ http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do http://casperflights.com/ http://radar.piopawlu.net/

And now i want some crewmen wi' long beards an' a frigate... ARRRRL