Hosting a Marine Traffic Receiving Station - any experience?

[Irish Rover]

I find Marine Traffic very useful. Before I had AIS I used it to identify other boats when cruising. Now I mainly use the app at home to identify passing ships and boats - my house is on an elevated site overlooking Kuşadası Bay with a good view of Samos Island and the northern entrance to the Mycale Strait. Since installing AIS I've noticed that many boats transmitting AIS do not show on MT and the reason is there's no receiving station in this area of Türkiye. There are multiple stations on Samos but the nearest one is 25Kn from us and only offers intermittent patchy coverage. So I'm considering applying to host a receiving station - as a service to other boaters but mainly because it's another boy's toy. So does anyone host a station or experience of doing so and what's the verdict?

 

[GHA]

you might have found this already, might be something useful in here, plenty of it!
Ais Decoder

 

[Roberto]

A friend has one in South Brittany; a nice advantage is Marine Traffic allows hosting stations to access for free navigational data for a given number of AIS ship stations which are received by Sat-Ais.
A normal MT user sees an icon in the middle of the ocean with a basic description "Pleasure yacht - position by satellite" with no indication of MMSI, name etc. Having access to sat-ais gives you the possibility to identify that particular yacht and/or search the relevant MMSI. Of course if that vessel ais message is received by satellite ais.
Maybe not relevant to you, but we played a bit with it during the Vendee Globe, or more seriously a few weeks ago to track a boat in distress in the Western Pacific (an interesting but long story, some other time possibly).

 

[Lightwave395]

I'm always puzzled by my boat not appearing on MT in some areas of Southern Brittany when others around me can be seen, I've disappeared approaching the Raz, entering the River Odet and also entering the Vilaine estuary to mention three. There's nothing wrong with my Comar transponder which works fine elsewhere.

 

[Irish Rover]

I'm always puzzled by my boat not appearing on MT in some areas of Southern Brittany when others around me can be seen, I've disappeared approaching the Raz, entering the River Odet and also entering the Vilaine estuary to mention three. There's nothing wrong with my Comar transponder which works fine elsewhere.

You should be able to see on MT the location of the nearest receiving stations and if they're operational or offline at any particular time. Boats with Class A will be more visible than Class B and I've also noticed some larger sailing yachts show up when many other boats don't and I figure, rightly or wrongly, they probably have mast top GPS antennas.