I did just watch a dot go through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, then take to the air and make a bee line straight to the Gulf of Mexico. Probably some weird artifact but made me chuckle.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
A contractor manages bridge hardware so I am missing details. They set it up. I troubleshoot and use the data.
AIS is connected to a serial-to-ethernet converter. That allows me to get the AIS stream over TCP/IP. I wrote an application to consume AIS and do what they wanted with it.
The serial-to-ethernet converters are the magic ingredient. It allowed us to have tracking and telemetry regardless of terrestrial VHF stations in the area. The original setup also provided a feed from Transas but we stopped using it. We also use a private AIS VHF recorder as a backup source of AIS messages. We used that a lot more before Starlink due to terrestrial blockage of VSAT links. The backup source was a good compliment to the primary. They had the most infra in areas that were blocked most often.
kind of neat, but major problems with accuracy. I'm watching a signficant volume of traffic navigating the mountain ranges of northern BC, the Yukon and Alaska. I think something is messed with the browser rendering based on zoome level, and the map interactions.
> Assuming a boat ("Looper") begins in Chicago, either take the Chicago River and Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, or the Cal-Sag Channel to the Des Plaines River. The waterway passes Joliet and soon becomes the Illinois River. The Illinois River travels west, through several locks, then southward, through Peoria. At Grafton, Illinois, the Illinois River joins the Mississippi River.
Of course you could start in the some Great Lake or the Erie Canal or anywhere else on the east coast.
I did just watch a dot go through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, then take to the air and make a bee line straight to the Gulf of Mexico. Probably some weird artifact but made me chuckle.