AIS-catcher is a dual-channel Automatic Identification System receiver designed for software-defined radio hardware.
It turns VHF AIS transmissions into decoded vessel information that can be viewed locally, recorded or forwarded to other applications and services. The software is useful for hobby receiving stations, maritime research, coverage analysis and Raspberry Pi installations. It only receives radio traffic and is explicitly intended for research and educational use rather than navigation or other safety-critical applications.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports RTL-SDR dongles, Airspy receivers, HackRF, HydraSDR, SDRplay and SoapySDR-compatible hardware.
- Accepts data from SDR hardware as well as file and network-based input sources.
- Processes both AIS radio channels for comprehensive reception.
- Produces standard NMEA messages for integration with other maritime applications.
- Can forward decoded traffic over UDP, HTTP and TCP connections.
- Includes a built-in web viewer showing vessels, tracks, station range and reception information.
- Provides plots and statistics for message rates, signal strength, frequency offset and reception distance.
- Offers configurable filters for vessel data, message quality and malformed AIS traffic.
- Can compare receiver decoding models on the same incoming signal and report their results separately.
- Maintains an editable catalogue of ports, berths, anchorages and other user-defined geographic areas.
- Tracks vessel visits and movement through defined places.
- Supports replay of recently received vessel traffic in the web viewer.
- Can optionally share received AIS data with the AIS-catcher community network.
- Provides managed browser-based configuration for setting up receiver input and output destinations.
- Offers Python bindings for processing AIS data from files, streams and notebooks.
Website: github.com/jvde-github/AIS-catcher
Support:
Developer: Jasper
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
AIS-catcher is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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