Cheap AIS receiver for laptop or phone?

[The Dark Knight]

I was just on holiday watching yachts sail past on their migration south in an area not serviced by marine traffic terrestrial and got wondering.

Looking for a cheap USB-dongle/Wifi/Bluetooth AIS receiver? Just looking at one for mucking around, not for real use (boat has AIS). Thinking either a USB dongle version for conecting to my laptop or a Wifi/Bluetooth that can be powered from a USB powerbank.

There seem to be plenty of them out there, but sometimes cheap tech bought online just don't work as advertised, so any recommendations/experience welcomed.

 

[caius]

You can use an rtl-sdr dongle to receive ais if you connect it to an appropriate antenna. You would need to configure the appropriate software to decode it, and it’s not necessarily plug and play. You can pipe the output to something like opencpn to display it. If you don’t mind experimenting and fiddling with it, then it can work well but it’s not an out of the box. They are quite useful devices for messing around with radio in general as their reception is entirely software defined so they can be used for a large variety of things.

 

[Slim]

dAISy AIS Receiver - The Original

AIS doesn't have to be expensive. With dAISy all you need to start tracking ships are a VHF antenna, a Windows, Mac, Linux or Android device, and a clear view of the sea. This marine AIS receiver works great with OpenCPN, OpenPlotter, Ship Plotter and any other software that accepts serial data...

shop.wegmatt.com

 

[The Dark Knight]

You can use an rtl-sdr dongle to receive ais if you connect it to an appropriate antenna. You would need to configure the appropriate software to decode it, and it’s not necessarily plug and play. You can pipe the output to something like opencpn to display it. If you don’t mind experimenting and fiddling with it, then it can work well but it’s not an out of the box. They are quite useful devices for messing around with radio in general as their reception is entirely software defined so they can be used for a large variety of things.

Just read about the rtl-sdr. Sound like a little bit too mush hard work for my AIS play around. However it does seem like a fun gadget for radio in general.

 

[DanimalNZ]

I have the daisey and works well. Connected to a yakker2 so wifis the data to view on navionics on a tab (and opencpn running on a lappy).

Very cost effective AIS receiving solution. I found it plugnplay.

 

[Tom Keffer]

I bought a dAISy to play around with, and have taken it on a few delivery trips. It uses an SDR radio based on a Silicon Labs chip. It's pretty impressive for a low-cost solution, but it's nowhere near as sensitive as a dedicated receiver. Maybe 5 miles max, and that's with a Class A transmitter.

 

[TradingUp]

I bought a dAISy to play around with, and have taken it on a few delivery trips. It uses an SDR radio based on a Silicon Labs chip. It's pretty impressive for a low-cost solution, but it's nowhere near as sensitive as a dedicated receiver. Maybe 5 miles max, and that's with a Class A transmitter.

I have one setup using opencpn to feed into vessel finder and marine traffic. I get a max of 10nm based on the vessels around when looking at the statistics online. This is also being 300' above sea level; the radio and visual horizon are a lot further.

 

[TradingUp]

I should clarify the above post. I’m averaging 10nm receiving class A. I don’t have enough class b traffic to be able to determine proper range.