Imagine you don’t have an AIS receiver or perhaps before leaving you want to check the traffic in the area that you are going to be sailing in. It is possible to download this information via an internet connection with the company Marine Traffic.
Marine Traffic offer a variety of subscriptions, starting with a basic free service. It is worth noting that before starting, AIS information received from Marine Traffic is not the same as having a real AIS receiver because can be anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour old.
It is ideal for getting an idea of the amount of traffic in a given area, rather being used to calculate the best moment to cross a busy shipping lane.
Let’s see how to set it up in 3 steps:
Step 1 :
Create an account at: Marine Traffic http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/p/partners/timezero
Step 2 :
Receive identification key :
Step 3 :
In the layers tab, click on Marine Traffic within the Targets sub-menu:
Once you have done this, the targets will appear and with the basic plan, you can already see each boat’s position, COG & SOG as well as the last update time.
The Marine Traffic targets will appear when the chart is zoomed in to the area that you want to check. Targets are refreshed automatically every one minute (inside TIMEZERO) or as soon as the chart is scrolled to a new location.
Get only recent data by adjusting the maximum “age” of a target that will be displayed on the chart from the Targets Options using the “Do not display Marine Traffic AIS older than…” setting. This is useful if you don’t want to display targets that have not been updated on the Marine Traffic website for a long time (out of a receiver range).
TIMEZERO users are able to subscribe to an “advanced” service (for a monthly fee) directly on the Marine Traffic website to receive even more detailed information about the target (Name, Size, Destination, ETA, Picture,…)
To find out more about Marine Traffic, download the mini-guide free by clicking here: