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Vessels via AIS

Put ships and boats on your Common Operating Picture (COP). Attach an SDR and a marine VHF antenna (or point AryaOS at an online feed), select the maritime role, and AIS traffic appears in ATAK/WinTAK/iTAK as native Cursor on Target (CoT) tracks.

Vessels broadcast AIS (Automatic Identification System) on two marine VHF channels near 161.975 / 162.025 MHz. AryaOS receives AIS with AIS-catcher, then aiscot converts each vessel report to CoT.

Two ways to receive AIS

AIS-catcher decodes AIS directly from RF with an RTL-SDR and a marine VHF antenna — no internet required. This is the standalone, disconnected mode.

Part Notes
RTL-SDR (RTL2832U) AIS-catcher's primary supported SDR.
Marine VHF antenna Tuned near 162 MHz. A proper marine whip vastly out-ranges a stock dongle antenna.
Coax / mount Height and a clear view of the water drive range.

VHF antenna matters

AIS is line-of-sight at VHF. Reception is dominated by antenna height and quality — an elevated marine VHF antenna is the single biggest range improvement. Keep the AIS antenna separated from 1090/978 MHz antennas on multi-sensor boxes to limit desense.

If the box has internet, AIS-catcher can pull from an online AIS source instead of (or in addition to) local RF — useful when you have no antenna or want wide-area coverage. No SDR is required in this mode. Configure the AIS-catcher input from the AIS-catcher plugin in Cockpit.

Turn on the maritime role

  1. Open Cockpit → AryaOS Site (https://<host>/admin/ or https://aryaos.local).
  2. In the Device role card, choose Maritime — AIS vessels.
  3. Click Apply role.

AryaOS enables ais-catcher and aiscot, and stops the air and drone pipelines.

sudo aryaos-role set maritime

How it flows

flowchart LR
    A[Marine VHF antenna] --> S[RTL-SDR]
    S --> C[AIS-catcher]
    Feed[(Online AIS feed)] -.-> C
    C -->|AIS| X[aiscot]
    X -->|CoT| H[Charontak hub]
    H -->|Mesh SA 239.2.3.1:6969| E[ATAK / WinTAK / iTAK]

AIS-catcher exposes a local web UI and JSON on port 8100 (allowed through the firewall by default), and aiscot reads its output and emits CoT to the Charontak hub at udp+wo://127.0.0.1:28087.

Verify tracks

  1. Connect your EUD to the AryaOS hotspot (AryaOS-xxxx) or the same network; open your TAK client. Vessels appear automatically via Mesh SA.

  2. On the box:

    systemctl status ais-catcher aiscot

  3. Browse the AIS-catcher UI at http://<host>:8100 to confirm messages are being decoded.

MMSI and vessel types

aiscot maps AIS vessel data (MMSI, name, navigational status, and ship type) into TAK CoT types so vessels are distinguishable on the map. See AISCOT for the full mapping.