Feed ships to Skydex from adsb.im or docker-shipfeeder

· network · ais · feeders

A lot of people who feed aircraft already have a second stick on 162 MHz. The adsb.im image runs AIS through docker-shipfeeder, which is AIS-catcher in a container, and it sends the ships to a handful of networks at once. Skydex was not one of them, and nothing on our side said how to add it.

You don't need a second decoder for that. AIS-catcher can send to many places from one command line, and Skydex takes its HTTP output natively. So the whole setup is one extra output on the box you already run.

What to do

  1. Sign in at skydex.online/feed, press Connect a receiver and pick Ships (AIS). You get a station id.
  2. On adsb.im open Setup → Advanced → AIS / Shipfeeder and find the field called ais-catcher extra command line options. On plain docker-shipfeeder the same thing is the AISCATCHER_EXTRA_OPTIONS variable.
  3. Paste this, with your station id in place of the placeholder:
-H https://<your-station-id>@skydex.online/api/ais/feed gzip on interval 15 RESPONSE off

If the field already holds options, put a space before the line. Your other feeds keep working as before; this only adds one more destination.

RESPONSE off keeps the container log quiet. Without it AIS-catcher prints our reply to every upload, which is every fifteen seconds. Errors still show up.

How to know it works

Open the AIS page or /feed from the same network as the receiver and press Check my address. It tells you whether ships are arriving from your address right now and whether they are credited to your station. The station page goes live with the first messages, and the ships it hears show up on the live ships map with the "heard by a Skydex receiver" mark.

What happens next

We asked the docker-shipfeeder maintainers to add Skydex as a built-in option, the way the image already lists other networks. Until that lands, the extra options line is the way, and it will keep working afterwards too. The same instructions now sit on the AIS hub under the setup steps and on the feeder landing page.

If you feed ships from a part of the coast where nobody else listens, you will see it on the coverage map within the first day. That is where a single antenna changes the most.

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