Cheap AIS

[doug748]

I was hoping to get something that is is a complete kit In a box with every thing I would need. Unpack it and Install.

Like you I much prefer stand alone kit but the options are pricey.


As Supertramp has said, the Vesper Watchmate 850 would have suited you but discontinued long ago. Garmin bought them out so that takes care of the competition from that quarter.


Keep your eyes open and one may come up secondhand, they are very low power devices and have some excellent features. Anything less than £350 - £400 would be a good buy.

Next the Icom MA510Ta. These have a colour screen and some other handy functions. I saw one the other day in my local Force 4. The bad news is a cost of over £700. Again you may be lucky and find a used one.



PS,
There was another, similar to the Icom but black and white screen, forgot the details, but worth investigation if one should come up used.

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[Supertramp]

Like you I much prefer stand alone kit but the options are pricey.


As Supertramp has said, the Vesper Watchmate 850 would have suited you but discontinued long ago. Garmin bought them out so that takes care of the competition from that quarter.
View attachment 191996

Keep your eyes open and one may come up secondhand, they are very low power devices and have some excellent features. Anything less than £350 - £400 would be a good buy.

Next the Icom MA510Ta. These have a colour screen and some other handy functions. I saw one the other day in my local Force 4. The bad news is a cost of over £700. Again you may be lucky and find a used one.

View attachment 191997

PS,
There was another, similar to the Icom but black and white screen, forgot the details, but worth investigation if one should come up used.

.
.

Agree with this and the low power consumption is a big plus for me as it stays on all the time. I would look at 2nd hand if I wanted to replace - the Vesper has been totally reliable.

It's easy to see no benefit from AIS but it takes a lot of stress out of crossing shipping routes, rounding busy headlands and doing either in poor visibility or darkness. You can watch the big ships making course adjustments to avoid you, provided you hold a steady course.

Obviously not much use in the Solent, except to get early warning of a Red Funnel ferry but a dark night off Holyhead is a different story.

 

[TSB240]

Possibly one of the cheapest all in one box ais transponder including various simple displays of alarms,targets and relative position of other ais transmitting targets.

Matsutec HP-528A Marine AIS Automatisches Identifikationssystem HP-528 Navigator - AliExpress 1420

It replaced the earlier and popular matsutec hp33a

 

[dgadee]

My VHFs have those tiny AIS screens. Hard to read so I never look at them. My system displays on OpenCPN on a 16" monitor. You can actually see collision data. Not for the cockpit of course but I use a tablet for that (not sun proof).

 

[Sea Change]

My VHFs have those tiny AIS screens. Hard to read so I never look at them. My system displays on OpenCPN on a 16" monitor. You can actually see collision data. Not for the cockpit of course but I use a tablet for that (not sun proof).

I suppose it depends on how useful you expect AIS to be. If a dot and a general direction is enough for you, great. If you want to get name, CPA, etc, a tiny screen will just be annoying.

 

[James_Calvert]

We have an earlier ICOM fixed VHF and AIS receiver. It can display AIS data on a small graphic. I find the listings available on other screens much more useful. If you note which ones have a close CPA, and check how their bearings change (or not) over time, it's better than you'd get with a hand bearing compass, and you can dig into other useful data.

If the handheld ICOM VHF/AIS units have the same facilities thats enough of what you really need.

I've now got a stand alone transmitter receiver as well in an orange box. No screen but it gives me AIS output onto the Navionics on my phone and tablet. I still use both AIS data sources and like, and have once needed, the redundancy.

 

[Shuggy]

We have a McMurdo SmartFind M10, which has been a pain in the backside. For reasons I never got to the bottom of (I posted a load of stuff on here about 5 years ago) it would never transmit our heading properly. We often appeared to be going astern when it was on the NMEA 2k network. The last resort was to connect it to a Quark box (like the ones posted above) using NMEA 0183 and thus isolating it from the NMEA 2k network, allowing the Quark to be the interface. The Quark in turn connects via WiFi to a fixed IP address on the boat’s 4G router, relaying the info to any tablet or phone that’s also connected to the 4G router via WiFi. This means I have a true plotter back-up in my iPad, which also receives AIS, depth, speed, wind etc through the Quark. The Quark box also translates the McMurdo’s NMEA 0183 messages onto the NMEA 2k network, allowing the main plotter to access it. It fried my brain at the time.

I spent hours downloading the McMurdo’s log onto a USB stick and using software to analyse what it was transmitting but I could never get to the bottom of the problem.

TLDR - I would steer clear of a McMurdo if you want to integrate it into an NMEA 2k set-up in the future. Other people on the internet have experienced similar.

 

[Dellquay13]

My navigation is from London chart plotters using a tablet supplied by them. I do not consider my self over tec savvy, but I do get by. My boat is a 29 ft long keel boat that I have recently taken owner ship of. Apart from costal sailing I would like to do a few cross channel trips. Most of my sailing is single handed. I am slowly getting back into sailing after not owning a boat for a good number of years. I hold RYA Day skipper and watch leader tickets dated from about 1975. I must admit I am finding getting to grips with all the new to me tec a bit of a pain.

I too have a tablet from LCN. I bought it as a cheap way to get AIS receive on a display, as I wanted to see how the large commercial shipping and port authority vessels around me were likely to affect me.
I am very pleased with the results adding a Quark QK-A024 receiver with wifi, and an EasyAIS VHF splitter on my vhf antenna but you could very easily just connect a standalone stubby antenna to the quark. It needs a 5v supply, I bought a cheap 12v to USB module.

I believe Steve at LCN sells complete tablet, Quark and antenna packages, but if you buy the kit separately it is easy to get it to talk to each other.

I found a subscription to Navionics worth paying for though, the clarity of their AIS overlay was much better compared to the original software and charts on the LCN tablet

The very cheapest option may be a NASA AIS radar standalone if you can find a secondhand one, but it won’t show as much info such as closest point of approach

 

[Tranona]

The very cheapest option may be a NASA AIS radar standalone if you can find a secondhand one, but it won’t show as much info such as closest point of approach

Marine superstore still have one in stock at a knockdown price - less than I paid over 25 years ago when they were state of the art. Seem to remember it took a while to get use to the quirky display but was a boon for channel crossing.

 

[dgadee]

I suppose it depends on how useful you expect AIS to be. If a dot and a general direction is enough for you, great. If you want to get name, CPA, etc, a tiny screen will just be annoying.

Lots of traffic crossing our path going from Rhodes to Preveza last year. No doubt dodgy Russian tankers amongst them. I used AIS all the time to check on CPA. Would not have trusted anyone to give me right of way. I think AIS receiving is a huge boon to safe navigation. Transmitting from a yacht? Not so much.

 

[Refueler]

You are only seen if someone is looking...
They need a device to slap the watch keeper of the other ship with pair of wet knickers....

Most AIS will alarm if CPA approaches inside your limit ... I'm forever accepting alarms on my units ... only way to stop them - is to turn off my AIS.

 

[PaulRainbow]

Most AIS will alarm if CPA approaches inside your limit ... I'm forever accepting alarms on my units ... only way to stop them - is to turn off my AIS.

Should be able to switch the alarms off permanently, certainly can on the Echomap. Where i'm based it would be never ending alarms if i had them turned on.

 

[Sea Change]

Should be able to switch the alarms off permanently, certainly can on the Echomap. Where i'm based it would be never ending alarms if i had them turned on.

You certainly can on the ONWA I've got.

 

[Refueler]

You certainly can on the ONWA I've got.

Its not the ONWA .... its the Echomap 92sv that annoys me ... I looked in the options and it says turn off alarms ... but then few minutes later - its alarms again ... need to look again at it.

My ONWA feeds into my plexor and distributes AIS etc to tablet / PC / Echomap / Phone etc. via 0183 and WiFi

 

[Alicatt]

Yup my Echomap 95sv does the same, turn off the alarms and a few minutes later the boat berthed 100m along the dock triggers the alarm again, quite frustrating

 

[OCuea]

Like you I much prefer stand alone kit but the options are pricey.


As Supertramp has said, the Vesper Watchmate 850 would have suited you but discontinued long ago. Garmin bought them out so that takes care of the competition from that quarter.
View attachment 191996

Keep your eyes open and one may come up secondhand, they are very low power devices and have some excellent features. Anything less than £350 - £400 would be a good buy.

Next the Icom MA510Ta. These have a colour screen and some other handy functions. I saw one the other day in my local Force 4. The bad news is a cost of over £700. Again you may be lucky and find a used one.

View attachment 191997

PS,
There was another, similar to the Icom but black and white screen, forgot the details, but worth investigation if one should come up used.

.
.

Is this the black and white one you mean? (I have not read every post in this 4 page long thread so apologies if already posted)

Nasa Clipper AIS Radar | Force 4 Chandlery

Can be bought 2nd hand with a cheap gps antenna and a cheap vhf antenna …. Better than a splitter in my view

 

[doug748]

Is this the black and white one you mean? (I have not read every post in this 4 page long thread so apologies if already posted)

Nasa Clipper AIS Radar | Force 4 Chandlery

Can be bought 2nd hand with a cheap gps antenna and a cheap vhf antenna …. Better than a splitter in my view

Yes, the NASA is a very handy set but only receives. I think Icom did an earlier model transceiver that had a black on white screen.

 

[Refueler]

Is this the black and white one you mean? (I have not read every post in this 4 page long thread so apologies if already posted)

Nasa Clipper AIS Radar | Force 4 Chandlery

Can be bought 2nd hand with a cheap gps antenna and a cheap vhf antenna …. Better than a splitter in my view

With something like that - I would very quickly get fed up with and want better ...

I had receive only Marine Gadgets AIS for PC ... excellent bit of kit .. sadly designer / producer died ... product no longer available. I used it for Ship to Ship work ... but when I decided to set up on my boat ... I already knew I wanted Transceiver ...

To say better than a splitter - sorry but that shows you have no idea how a splitter works and its actual performance. Even a passive splitter to masthead antenna will put a separate rail mount antenna in the shade by a huge margin ..

 

[OCuea]

With something like that - I would very quickly get fed up with and want better ...

I had receive only Marine Gadgets AIS for PC ... excellent bit of kit .. sadly designer / producer died ... product no longer available. I used it for Ship to Ship work ... but when I decided to set up on my boat ... I already knew I wanted Transceiver ...

To say better than a splitter - sorry but that shows you have no idea how a splitter works and its actual performance. Even a passive splitter to masthead antenna will put a separate rail mount antenna in the shade by a huge margin ..

The op wanted examples of receive only as well as transceiver , so I gave them one. Their vague OP with no budget etc . Their choice to make. Having receive only may be what they want even if you don’t. Maybe it is all they can afford …… although someone posted an Aliexpress or Alibaba colour transceiver for a cheap price.

You say I have no idea how a splitter works. Isn’t that a bit of a rude thing to say , Especially as you don’t know me ?
You flick a switch and can’t use your vhf any longer. Flick it again and have vhf but NO AIS. Some people don’t like splitters for that reason. I picked that view up from this forum many years ago. some people dont like splitters for that reason ONLY…..

I also did not say to mount antenna on a rail…….you must have assumed that. a proper installation would be a 2nd antenna mounted high up but not so as to interfere with vhf radio antenna ….. hence no splitter …. again.

You must be happy to have vhf and no AIS or AIS and no vhf if you are using a splitter?

I know quite a bit about vhf antennas and have even tuned some for my own reasons. I bought a metz many years ago and can verify the swr is better than any antenna I had previously. I used my splitter (the thing you say I know nothing about) to connect 2 antennas to one radio or dummy load and swr meter etc etc). I wish people would be more polite in their posts. I do know how a splitter works you see , in-spite of your view. Sorry to contradict you .

You can use this equation below to calculate your ‘huge margin’ and edit your post to be more accurate and give an actual measurement in miles rather than stating a vague ‘huge margin’ if you like ….. that would give the OP some useful info (making the assumption that they don’t know the height advantage ….. and it is not good to make assumptions very often ….. can lead to posts appearing rude or insulting)

(√antenna height) * 1.23 = radar horizon

E.g. Sq root 25 * 1.23 = 6
as opposed to sw root 1 * 1.23= 1.23 for pushpit mount

Hope this post clarifies any assumptions made.

 

[seeSimon]

Yup my Echomap 95sv does the same, turn off the alarms and a few minutes later the boat berthed 100m along the dock triggers the alarm again, quite frustrating

Seems they needed echomap 95sv on those two ships in the allision off the humber recently?

The ais trace of the container ship heading for the tanker was astounding!