<p>I apologize if this has been posted before, but I wasn't able to find it on this forum...</p>
<p>I tried tracking my son's ship through Vessel Tracker and the sailwx site with no luck. I came across the Marine Traffic website run by the University of the Aegean, and this morning I was able to look at a satellite shot of his ship docked halfway across the world. Soooooooo cool! Right now I can see that the sun is coming up over there! The picture refreshes every couple of minutes. Highly recommend those parents like me experiencing the first leg of sea year check it out.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting the update. It works great.</p>
<p>Last year, sailwx and other site published DS ship track just fine.
This year, it does not appear.
At least this way , I have a guess at which timezone he’s in , halfway across the world !
(This is just the neatest remote college campus in the world!)</p>
<p>FYI: Those sites track ships in different ways.</p>
<p>LiveAIS uses a network of AIS receivers which, using the ships’ transmitted GPS lat/lon, places an icon of it on the Google Earth map. Those maps are not real time and the ship you see underneath the icon is most likely (99.9% chance) another ship that happened to be in that berth when the shot was taken. Other than having the AIS powered up, this type of tracking requires no action on the part of the ship’s crew. AIS is used for many things (online tracking is pretty much the lowest concern onboard) and the transceiver is very rarely shut-down. </p>
<p>SailWX gets its ship positions from weather reports received by vessels at sea. These are sent in manually via satellite and, of course, depend on the ship’s crew to be done. This is why you generally don’t see positions of ships when they’re in or near port because you stop sending weather reports during those times.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. Sailwx is now three weeks out of date for my son’s ship, and VesselTracker doesn’t appear to be able to find his ship either. </p>
<p>I loved the satellite image of his ship (it looked like what I imagine his ship would look like from the air) unloading in port on MarineTraffic. They have some areas without coverage, but if I can get a glimpse of where the ship is from time to time, it will make me feel better. I guess that’s a “mom” thing ;)</p>
<p>One more thing about the MarineTraffic site. AIS is a VHF transmission that is essentially line of sight. This means that the general receiving range is about 30-40 miles depending on the height of the antennas (with some rare exceptions). Therefore, that site only shows vessels in range of one of their receivers, which are all land-based. So, if your son’s ship is not showing up, that means they’re just out of range (ocean crossing, unmonitored area, etc). </p>
<p>On that site, I believe you can setup an alerter that will email you when a certain ship gets picked up again. Click on “My Fleet” on the left hand margin, just above the ship icons/check boxes.</p>
<p>The sailwx.info ship tracker is driven by weather reports submitted by the ships to the WMO’s VOS (Voluntary Observing Ships) program. Ask your student to pester the bridge watch officers or bridge trainees. Get them to submit a weather report at least once a day. That will allow the ship to be tracked, and will improve the accuracy of marine weather forecasts.</p>