I would like to admit I don't like big ocean going cruisers , tankers etc they scare me. ( especially at night ) . I'm bringing my boat from Scarborough to Sydney in a few weeks so I wanted AIS . Oh and I'm cheap .
Looked over the forum and went with Daisy AIS , gstar4 GPS puck and laptop running open cpn . Tested it today and it all seems to work ok from the shore. Will take the output to my chart plotter on board as well . If I can do it ,any one can . Pretty straight forward instructions from all suppliers.
Does daisy ais transmit your location so that others can see you?
Apps such as findship, marine traffic and the like rely on the other boats AIS being read by a third party, and then transmitted to you via the mobile network. You may not have mobile coverage, there can be delays, drop outs etc etc. Marine traffic has lost us for days on end during this years trip to the Whitsundays. No way would I rely on one of those as a safety measure.
No it doesn't transmit , I wanted a portable system to move to whatever boat I am sailing on . I tried the apps but you need internet . I will at some point fit an AIS transponder to my boat .
If big ships are such a danger, why is there not a single record of one running over a yacht in Australian coastal waters, as far as I know? It's sometimes thought that the big steel schooner Patanela may have been run down off Sydney in 1988, but even if that was the case we are talking about a one in 30 year incident. After all, ships are big things with bright lights; they are not hard to see. Lobster pots, tinnies, other yachts, powerboats and whales often do not carry AIS so you still need to keep a lookout anyway.
I recently got a dAISy 2+, delivered from US in 3 days, had a old crappy piece of coax and broken antenna at home to test, plugged it into Opencpn and could see the ferry's on the Harbour nearby.... so easy. Antenna was about 2 meters off the ground surrounded by unit blocks, was surprised to see anything.
Will install on the boat with AIS masthead splitter when home next.
Also got the $5 WIFI module for fun, apparently can use it to get AIS on Navionics. Has anyone tried that yet?
And how many butt clenching near misses? They probably don't get reported. A quick look at marine traffic and I see a large number of 150-330 meter long vessels traveling Bass straight to Sydney at between 11-20 knots. Even just during a clear night it's difficult to guess their course until they are maybe a lot closer than is comfortable, and if they're bearing down on you at 20 knots and your doing 6 knots on a crossing course, then things can get hectic, quickly. There was a good safety vid on YouTube covering this and it certainly convinced me of the dangers and how quickly people get into trouble with large shipping, I'll see if I can dig it up.
Offshore today testing my new VHF, Standard Horizon 2200E with inbuilt GPS and AIS. I have the SS masthead aerial that always worked well with the old radio but todays technology is impressive. I can see where the money went! I could hear both sides of the conversations from Narooma and Sydney. GPS works as advertized and I had contacts on the AIS. Waiting on a cable to connect to OpenCPN and will use the radio's GPS to drive OpenCPN and keep the puck as backup. The little screen on the radio for AIS only goes out to 10 miles but it might be a different story when connected to my 22 inch monitor.
Of course while I was fooling around with technology I was busy dodging whales!
Interestingly, solo teen sailor, Jesse Martin had what he believed to be a near miss with a tanker in the Atlantic.
He had turned his nav lights off and wasn't running his radar ( to save power) and got the shock of his life when a tanker passed a couple of hundred meters behind him lit up like a xmas tree. He believes that the tanker must have seen him because of the way the tanker was lit up,, but he was too ashamed to call the tanker on vhf, fearing a stern lecture from the captain. He changed his mind about not running his nav lights.
Given the same circumstances today, a simple VHF/AIS radio combo may have taken the "Shock" out of the equation
Having sailed many ocean miles, don't be cheap spend what you have to spend. Its a great tool in the tool box but one can never stop having eyes on deck keeping watch. I was never concerned about what I could see on the AIS...its what you cant see on the AIS but what you see with the eyes....