Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Flightradar24 for Ships (atlas.flexport.com)

162 points by chromy 12 hours ago

ltrg 6 hours ago

This only covers container ships btw. For full coverage of all vessels, try the 'vessel presence' layer in Global Fishing Watch's interactive map, based on a feed from Spire: https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/

nehal3m 43 minutes ago

https://www.marinetraffic.com has most AIS transponders, I use it to track friends on commercial and private vessels.

joezydeco 3 hours ago

https://aisvesseltracker.com/ is a good one too. Shows a LOT more, including cruise ships and pleasure craft.

landl0rd an hour ago

It's also a bit limited. The gold standard is still kpler.

cess11 6 hours ago

Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting. I've used Vessel Finder due to something being a nuisance with Marine Traffic.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/

dwedge 4 hours ago

Years ago I used to subscribe to a service that did this for oil tankers and tried to estimate oil to each route, they wrote a weekly summary. Eventually they decided they only wanted enterprise clients and not people like me who, working in devops, had no need for this service at all and only paid the $20 a month out of some weird fascination

general_reveal 2 hours ago

It almost seems like I could have lived life as a trader and traveled the seas. Don’t know the type of money involved, and I guess I wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that in real life. So much easier in video games.

I’d just be a simple TEMU hauler, no fuss, simple life. Travel the world, catch some fish.

victorbjorklund 9 hours ago

What is different from marinetraffic?

n2j3 8 hours ago

Marinetraffic is a good example of enshittification. Started well, now it's heavy and ad-laden, practically useless without a paid account.

dry_soup 8 hours ago

Sounds like Flightradar24

jen729w 8 hours ago

rustyhancock 8 hours ago

Noaidi 8 hours ago

I find Marinetraffic is fine without an account.

Here is a link to oil tankers anchored around the Strait of Hormuz. It has much better filters:

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:56.8/cente...

dzhiurgis 2 hours ago

wodenokoto 9 hours ago

And what’s the similarity to flight radar?

notahacker 9 hours ago

A real time visualization using AIS instead of ADS-B feeds, presumably

wodenokoto 8 hours ago

throw0101c 7 hours ago

Meta: I like the use of an actual globe when zoomed out. Wish more things would do this.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall–Peters_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_equal-area_project...

urba_ 3 hours ago

I once worked on a problem: GPS tracking shipping containers, since one company had almost 1% lost/stolen each year. I had an idea of using AIS with Si4362 to get positioning data from the container ship itself, but it was nearly impossible to get access to reefer monitoring systems. We ended up just using 4G NB-IoT for coastal tracking and it did solve the problem

sgt 11 hours ago

Seems to only have a tiny amount of ships compared to marinetraffic.com ?

jameshart 8 hours ago

Seems regionally biased. This map makes it look like the Americas barely see any ship traffic, while the South China Sea is paved with ships from shore to shore.

moffkalast 3 hours ago

The way I understand marinetraffic works is by having AIS receivers near shores and sending any received contacts to an API. If this works the same way then there's probably a lot fewer receivers so far.

0dayman an hour ago

I don't see any of the American destroyers in Hormoz

enraged_camel 35 minutes ago

This is only for container ships.

Levitating 8 hours ago

Seems like it's just cargo ships? And presumably not even all of them.

I'll prefer vesselfinder for marinetraffic.

gehsty 7 hours ago

Interesting, a cool resource for an API endpoint for AIS data so aisstream.io. Seems quite solid. Any one any idea of a good resource for satellite AIS data - I feel like the EU probably funded it and I can’t find anything on capricious etc.

dmarinus 7 hours ago

I tried posting ais-catcher.org but it got ignored

gerry_shaw 7 hours ago

Doman needs to be www.ais-catcher.org

amelius 5 hours ago

Did anyone spot the USS Abraham Lincoln?

appointment 2 hours ago

Military ships don't run their radio beacons in combat zones. (There was an incident last year where the USS Theodore Roosevelt collided with a civilian cargo ship at night at least partially because it tried to approach the Suez canal with it's beacon off.)

sublinear 3 hours ago

Off topic, but I hope the UX improves. It's almost unusable.

Clicking on anything is an error-prone mess and then it hijacks the back button by changing the URL. That would be better off as a simple "share" link somewhere in the popup.

nodesocket 5 hours ago

This seems useful speculating on short term oil prices. I believe the straight of hormuz may be closed or rumor of closing. Every expert seems to think that will spike oil prices.

newzino 7 hours ago

These tools went mainstream when the Houthis started hitting container ships. Watching AIS transponders go dark or vessels suddenly diverting around the Cape was something you just couldn't get from news coverage. And with Hormuz tensions right now, the real-time value is even higher.

vldszn 8 hours ago

Looking good! Thanks for sharing