The water on one map
There is a new page at skydex.online/ais/live, the live network map of the ships side. It draws the whole planet, and on it every vessel a Skydex receiver can hear at this moment, the antennas that hear them, and the squares of water they have lit up over the last 30 days.
While this was being written that was 260 hulls from three receivers, in New Orleans, on the Humber and in Sydney. Three green dots on three continents, each with its own little crowd of ships beside it. A week ago the third one did not exist, which is why this page is worth drawing now and was not worth drawing in August.
Why a third map
The water already had two, and neither of them answered this question.
Ships we hear is the shared tiled world map with everything except our own traffic filtered out. It is the right tool for looking closely at one stretch of coast, it can be narrowed down to a single station with a feed id, and it draws hulls without drawing a single receiver. The coverage map answers where the network has ever heard, in 30 days of measured squares, with nothing moving on it.
The new page is the live traffic, the measured water and the antennas in one frame. That combination is what tells you how far this network reaches, and it is the same arrangement the aircraft side got yesterday at /adsb/live. Both are called the live network map of their band. The name is shared on purpose, the way the coverage map has named both grids since September the 9th: the band is in the hub above it, in the breadcrumb and in the page title, and inside a band each name still points at exactly one answer.
What it publishes, and what it does not
The hulls are live positions our own antennas heard. Everything the upstream feed contributes is filtered out, so an empty stretch of sea on this map means no Skydex receiver covers it. Colour is the AIS category, the same palette every other Skydex map uses. Private recreational craft are drawn as anonymous outlines with no name and no MMSI, and nothing about them is stored anywhere.
Receivers sit on their nearest city, never on their antenna. A station's exact position is never published, and the nearest of 1254 baked cities is the same step of coarseness its own page prints. It is off by tens of kilometres by design. Which antenna heard which square is not published either, so the blue wash belongs to the network and to no single station.
Nothing new runs on the server for this. The page reads four endpoints that were already there, and the canvas is the same component the aircraft map uses, so both bands get any improvement to it. If you have an AIS receiver, or an RTL-SDR and an antenna for 162 MHz, connect it and your own stretch of water joins the picture. Feeding us is free, and AIS is a broadcast, so keep feeding whoever you already feed.