Flightradar24 for Ships
atlas.flexport.com163 points by chromy 12 hours ago
163 points by chromy 12 hours ago
This only covers container ships btw. For full coverage of all vessels, try the 'vessel presence' layer in Global Fishing Watch's interactive map, based on a feed from Spire: https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/
https://www.marinetraffic.com has most AIS transponders, I use it to track friends on commercial and private vessels.
https://aisvesseltracker.com/ is a good one too. Shows a LOT more, including cruise ships and pleasure craft.
Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting. I've used Vessel Finder due to something being a nuisance with Marine Traffic.
Years ago I used to subscribe to a service that did this for oil tankers and tried to estimate oil to each route, they wrote a weekly summary. Eventually they decided they only wanted enterprise clients and not people like me who, working in devops, had no need for this service at all and only paid the $20 a month out of some weird fascination
It almost seems like I could have lived life as a trader and traveled the seas. Don’t know the type of money involved, and I guess I wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that in real life. So much easier in video games.
I’d just be a simple TEMU hauler, no fuss, simple life. Travel the world, catch some fish.
What is different from marinetraffic?
Marinetraffic is a good example of enshittification. Started well, now it's heavy and ad-laden, practically useless without a paid account.
Sounds like Flightradar24
In case anyone isn't aware:
https://globe.adsbexchange.com
– is an alternative to FlightRadar24 with more data.
ADSBX used to be volunteer ran until JETNET paid the guy who controlled the domain name $20 million dollars to "sell" it to them and steal everyone else's source code and data. They now do selective filtering to appease their commercial clients.
Everyone has moved to https://globe.airplanes.live/ and https://app.airframes.io/flights now.
Here is the lawsuit from one former group of contributors: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm...
Unfortunately adsbexchange does not allow you to see the source/destination of flights
At least for FR24 you get a "Gold" account (no longer business) simply for running a feed.
Nitpick: It's called Contributor and supposedly has the same features of the previous subscription. It still feels like a setup for future degradation by some marketing genius.
I find Marinetraffic is fine without an account.
Here is a link to oil tankers anchored around the Strait of Hormuz. It has much better filters:
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:56.8/cente...
Any of these provide satellite data without charge?
Also - is there any sites that publish parsed data from SAR sats?
And what’s the similarity to flight radar?
A real time visualization using AIS instead of ADS-B feeds, presumably
Meta: I like the use of an actual globe when zoomed out. Wish more things would do this.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall–Peters_projection
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_equal-area_project...
I once worked on a problem: GPS tracking shipping containers, since one company had almost 1% lost/stolen each year. I had an idea of using AIS with Si4362 to get positioning data from the container ship itself, but it was nearly impossible to get access to reefer monitoring systems. We ended up just using 4G NB-IoT for coastal tracking and it did solve the problem
Seems to only have a tiny amount of ships compared to marinetraffic.com ?
Seems regionally biased. This map makes it look like the Americas barely see any ship traffic, while the South China Sea is paved with ships from shore to shore.
The way I understand marinetraffic works is by having AIS receivers near shores and sending any received contacts to an API. If this works the same way then there's probably a lot fewer receivers so far.
I don't see any of the American destroyers in Hormoz
Seems like it's just cargo ships? And presumably not even all of them.
I'll prefer vesselfinder for marinetraffic.
Interesting, a cool resource for an API endpoint for AIS data so aisstream.io. Seems quite solid. Any one any idea of a good resource for satellite AIS data - I feel like the EU probably funded it and I can’t find anything on capricious etc.
I tried posting ais-catcher.org but it got ignored
Did anyone spot the USS Abraham Lincoln?
Military ships don't run their radio beacons in combat zones. (There was an incident last year where the USS Theodore Roosevelt collided with a civilian cargo ship at night at least partially because it tried to approach the Suez canal with it's beacon off.)
Off topic, but I hope the UX improves. It's almost unusable.
Clicking on anything is an error-prone mess and then it hijacks the back button by changing the URL. That would be better off as a simple "share" link somewhere in the popup.
This seems useful speculating on short term oil prices. I believe the straight of hormuz may be closed or rumor of closing. Every expert seems to think that will spike oil prices.
These tools went mainstream when the Houthis started hitting container ships. Watching AIS transponders go dark or vessels suddenly diverting around the Cape was something you just couldn't get from news coverage. And with Hormuz tensions right now, the real-time value is even higher.
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Looking good! Thanks for sharing