Every vessel the Skydex volunteer receivers can hear at this moment, on one map of the world, together with the receivers themselves and the water they have measured over the last 30 days.
12 ships receivers, 10 delivering right now, 7 countries, 6,870 distinct hulls in the last 30 days.
The hulls are live positions our own antennas heard. Everything the upstream feed contributes is filtered out, so an empty stretch of sea here means no Skydex receiver covers it, not that nothing is sailing there. Colour is the AIS category, the same palette every other Skydex map uses. Private recreational craft are on it as anonymous outlines: no name, no MMSI, and nothing about them is ever stored.
The receivers are drawn on the 0.1° square their antenna sits in, about 11 by 7 km in central Europe, never on the antenna itself. It is the same grid as the coverage squares, so it says no more than the traffic a station hears already does. A receiver whose owner has not set a position is not on the map at all, and still feeds the network exactly the same.
The blue wash is the measured grid: 0.1° squares where one of these receivers actually heard a vessel over the last 30 days. Which antenna heard which square is not published either, so the wash belongs to the network and to no one station.
Receivers are feeding from: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Kazakhstan, Spain, United Kingdom, United States of America.
This one answers where the whole ships network is at this second: every hull it hears and every antenna that hears them, framed on the planet. “Ships we hear” is the same live traffic on the shared tiled map, which is where you go to look closely at one stretch of coast, and it is the only one that can be filtered down to a single station. The coverage map answers where the network has ever heard, with 30 days of history instead of this second.
Ships we hear · Coverage map · The aircraft network, live
Every dot on it is somebody’s receiver on somebody’s roof or boat. An antenna for 162 MHz and an RTL-SDR is enough, and an AIS-catcher already feeding somewhere else can feed here too. AIS is a broadcast and nothing here is exclusive.