A front door for ships
Earlier today the ships band got receivers, a decoder, a ladder and a wall of vessel types on every station page. What it still didn't have was anywhere to send somebody who owns an AIS receiver and has never heard of us.
We checked how bad that was before fixing it. The recruiting landing at feed.skydex.online is three pages of hardware advice, setup lines, privacy terms and a live coverage map, and it mentions AIS zero times. It is an ADS-B site from the hero down to the FAQ. The only AIS-shaped thing anywhere was a band selector on the station registration form, which sits behind a login, on a page you reach once you already believe we take ships. Anybody searching for where to send AIS data had nothing to land on.
So there is now skydex.online/ais, next door to /adsb. It covers what the network is, both ways into it, the hardware, what a station gets out of it, and what we publish.
Why a second page and not a section
Adding a ships chapter to the ADS-B hub would have been cheaper. We didn't, for the same reason the station list grew two ladders this morning. A receiver feeds one band, the ladders are ranked separately, and the people are different people with different equipment. A page titled "ADS-B network" that switches to ships halfway down has the same problem the single station list had. The search queries don't overlap either: somebody typing "adsb feeder raspberry pi" and somebody typing "AIS receiver share data" want different pages.
The other cheap option was a second static site on its own subdomain. Also no. Splitting a young domain's authority across another host is the mistake we corrected two days ago when the ADS-B hub moved onto the apex. /ais inherits the apex's weight and passes it down to the station pages.
What's on it
Both doors, ready to paste. AIS-catcher takes a station id in the URL, so feeding is one flag on a command line you already run. Any other decoder that emits NMEA (rtl-ais, AISrec, OpenCPN, a hardware receiver on a boat) can send plain AIVDM over UDP to port 10110 with no account at all. Put a tag block in front of the sentences and the traffic is credited to your station; leave it off and it arrives anonymously. Both work.
One sentence on the page does more work than it looks like: an AIS receiver is not an ADS-B receiver. Different band, different antenna, different decoder. Half the people who find the page will arrive from the aircraft side, and saying plainly that their existing stick won't hear ships saves them an evening of debugging hardware that works. The link to the other network is right there, and a site with both antennas registers twice, because a station is one receiver.
The live numbers follow one rule. When we counted and the answer is nobody yet, the page says so and asks for the first receiver. When the count itself fails, the section doesn't render. "No receiver yet" is a measurement, and printing it because a database didn't answer would be a claim about the network on the page strangers judge it by.
The ships ladder is empty today and the page says so. If you have a receiver, the setup lines are on /ais.