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The final piece of my navigation and safety additions to my sailboat finally came in – an AIS Class B transponder.  I chose the ACR Nauticast-B kit which includes a bunch of different things.  This post contains a lot of information on unboxing and initial playing of the unit.

I sail primarily near Elliott Bay in Puget Sound, Seattle, WA.  My sailboat currently has an AIS receiver that I have had for over a year, and it has proven well worth the investment.  I have it connected to my Garmin GPSMAP 5208 chartplotter, and shows a lot of details on ships moving around me.  Elliott Bay is very busy – two major ferry routes terminate here, and there are countless cargo ships and cruise liners moving around.  Case in point is a screen shot from last year where everyone was after me…

I wanted to go to the next level and have the ability to broadcast my location out via AIS-B so that those folks who choose to listen will see me.  I like sailing in Puget Sound, and I think that this will be a key safety system in making sure others see me ahead of time as well.

I purchased the unit through Milltech Marine – great folks with a lot of expertise in this area, and right in my backyard on Bainbridge Island.  They processed the necessary paperwork, which included getting details on my boat, measurements where the GPS antenna will be installed, and of course my existing MMSI number.

The Box

The unit came in a long box with the following items:

• VHF antenna, mounting, cables
• GPS antenna, mounting, cables
• CDs of software
• Manuals
• Nauticast unit
• Cable from Nauticast to GPS, VHF, etc.

Nauticast box

One thing of note – I explored whether I could use my existing VHF splitter and antenna for this, but Doug at Milltech recommended that I not do that.  There was a different setup I could put together, which I still may end up needing to do, but the preferred way is for the unit to have it’s own dedicated VHF antenna.  Keep in mind that the system will be broadcasting your location and vessel details constantly, and sometimes frequently depending on your speed, etc.  Sharing your existing VHF antenna could be problematic if you need to, say, make a VHF call for some reason.

The Antennas

The VHF antenna looks to be decent quality.  It’s an AIS branded antenna, whatever that means.  You can see a picture of the label here.  It comes with a decent length of cable, and molded ends on both ends.  That’s going to be a bit of an issue when snaking it through the various places and out aboveboards.  It’ll likely get cut and have to be re-ended.  It would have been nice had it come with a spare end, uncrimped and unconnected.   I’d guess the antenna is about 3′ tall.  It doesn’t come with a wealth of mounting options, but the base has the necessary holes and bracket to be mounted just about any way you’d like.

The GPS antenna is an ACR branded model and comes with a Glomex mount base.  The same goes here for both the cable and the base – the cable has the end on it, and the base has little mounting options included other than a flat surface.

GPS antenna

The Transponder

The transponder itself looks very well made – rugged and water proof with easy to see indicator lights, and cable connections.  It has good lockdown screw holes around the unit, and is nicely compact so it can fit in some out of the way location.

Transponder

There are three connectors – one for VHF, one for GPS, and one large one for the interface cable.   The interface cable fits very snugly, and has very long screw-downs, along with a very tight waterproof seal.  The cable itself has connections to power, RS432, RS232, and for a switch.  You can see a picture of the cable here.

Connectors

Testing a little

After unboxing, I wanted to give it a test at home.  I connected everything together, put the GPS and VHF outside, and powered up the unit.  I had loaded the Link2AIS software provided by ACR, and connected things via the RS232 serial interface, and waited for a bit while the unit acquired GPS satellites.

I was using my new Dell Mini 9 that I plan on having on the sailboat as my primary computer given it’s low power consumption and lack of moving parts.  The Dell doesn’t have a serial port, but I had a Keyspan USB-serial adapter.  Milltech sells these as well.

The system came up pretty quickly, and using the Link2AIS software I was able to see vessels near me pretty quickly.

Nearby vessels

There are a lot of really nicely thought out options in Link2AIS for configuring the unit, but the majority of it is not useful for actual route planning or looking at AIS targets.  It’s a pretty basic application from that perspective.  You can see some additional screen shots of the setup screens and positioning information in my set on Flickr.

What I really wanted to play around with was Coastal Explorer, the navigation software I use.  I fired it up, told it to discover my GPS, and it found the unit immediately.  A few minutes later, I had a whole host of targets on the screen just as you would expect:

Coastal Explorer AIS targets

I waited about 15 minutes, but I was never able to find my vessel on any of the online, web-based AIS tracking sites.  I’m not sure if that’s because I was not waiting long enough, on land (!), or because those sites only show AIS class A transponders.  I think I can assume that I’m showing up on everyone else’s receivers based on the fact that the transmit light on the unit was going quite frequently, and the software indicated that it was working OK, and had my MMSI and all the appropriate details.

I suppose one way to test would be to use my existing AIS receiver and see if I appear on my chartplotter!  I guess I will have to wait until I install it to find out for sure…

Overall Impressions

The unit is very well built, and included are the basic pieces to get you up and running.  The software is solid, and has all of the features, and then some, to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot any problems you might have.  The documentation is complete, thorough and very well written.

References:

• Entire set of unboxing photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spmitchell/sets/72157611876841582/
• Milltech Marine: http://www.milltechmarine.com/AIS-300.htm
• ACR Nauticast: http://www.nauticast.com/index.php?id=333

steve Electronics, Navigation, Sailing acr nauticast, AIS, class b ais

Above is a screen shot from my chart plotter at the end of the day when I was sailing/motoring back into Elliott Bay here in Seattle. The larger boat icon in the center with the compass wind indicator around it is me, the rest of the smaller boats with red lines emanating out of them are all of the AIS targets my system is warning me about.

I had 3 Washington State Ferries closing in on my area – two car ferries and one fast passenger ferry, one tour boat, and eventually 2 tugs, one of which was going faster than I was, and on a similar course. AIS here only showed 2 of the three ferries, the tour boat, and the tug.

I couldn’t take any more pictures of the system becaue I had to pay attention at that point, but it was pretty nice to be able to sit in the cockpit hatchway and glance down to see what else was coming around the point behind the bluff.

I still haven’t figured out a great way to use the notification system within the Garmin unit for AIS. It goes off far too much and alerts when there are boats nearby on AIS sitting still. Other programs that are software based have more granularity and allow you to only fire off an alert when specific conditions are met, such as intercept within a certain amount of minutes. I’m hoping Garmin will get to that soon.

steve Electronics, Navigation AIS, garmin gpsmap 5208

I was going through a major overhaul on my navigation system and decided to install an AIS receiver. There are only a few of them out there, and some of them are way overpriced for the featureset. After reviewing a bunch of online reviews, I choose the Smart Radio SR162 and the Smart Radio VHF Antenna Splitter both sold by Milltech Marine in the U.S. After a few questions to the folks at Milltech, who answered same-day with detailed technical information, and copies of the newest manuals, plus some tips, I ordered it direct.

I chose the SR162 over the SR161 since I sail and motor in a congested, busy area, and want the assurance of both A and B channels used for AIS being caught by my systems. The SR161 only listens to the A channel, which limits the amount of boats it “hears” in busy areas.

The manual online is slightly better than the printed one that comes with the unit. There are a few confusing things in it, but overall if you know NMEA 0183 and basic VHF antennas, you can set this up. First was the VHF splitter – I opted to use this since I have a single VHF antenna on the top of my mast, and I didn’t want to add a second antenna dedicated to the AIS system. The splitter installs upstream of your other VHF devices, in my case my VHF radio, and allows the AIS receiver to use an existing antenna, while still allowing you to use the antenna for other things such as VHF radios, and VHF broadcasts. The splitter was easy to install, and required power as well as re-routing my existing VHF cable. Once that was installed, the resulting cables coming from it went to my VHF radio, and to the AIS unit.

Install of the AIS unit went pretty smoothly too. It required power, the input from the splitter, and output to my chartplotter. Initially I wanted to send the AIS output to my Shipmodul NMEA multiplexer, but after extensive testing, the high speed 38,400 baud rate of the AIS receiver added too much traffic to the rest of the data going back and forth, and caused overflows. Eventually, I chose to send it directly over a high speed NMEA 0183 port directly into my Garmin 5208 chartplotter. After using a multimeter to figure out which pins were which (you need pin 2 and 5), and cabling it up, all that was left was to power it and my chartplotter up, and configure my chartplotter to show AIS information. In about 30 seconds, I started to see AIS targets and information. That was it for configuration in terms of the AIS receiver.

A few notes:

First, your chartplotter or other software needs to support AIS. Check your specs first.

Second, my chartplotter did support AIS, but it does add delay to the system overall when it’s running in a wide scan mode. One thing I don’t like about the Garmin solution is that you can’t see AIS wider than 2 nautical miles maximum. In addition, their alarms are based on MMSI or AIS targets that are within a specific distance, not necessarily based on TCPA. If you don’t know what those acronyms mean, go look on some AIS sites.

It takes quite a while for the AIS target information to update to a decent usable level – this is by design of the AIS spec, so I’m not surprised. I would recommend turning these systems on early when you think you’re going to navigate sometime soon.

In general, I’ve been very happy with the unit, and AIS in general. It’s basically set-and-forget technology, and it allows me to see things around corners and ahead of time that I would have listened for on the VHF in the past. It doesn’t replace being attentive at the helm, but it sure adds more safety to sailing. It’s already helped me prevent course changes into shipping lanes in the few weeks I’ve been using it.

steve Electronics AIS, receiver

Part of my navigation systems overhaul was to replace my handheld Garmin 76C GPS with something larger and more reliable, fixed mounted, that could drive my autopilot and allow me to see electronic maps as well as plot courses.

At first, being in the computing industry for my day job, I started looking at a PC solution.  There’s lots of very well thought out software out there, and a lot of it doesn’t require expensive charts or hardware.  However, I was not comfortable trusting my entire navigation to a PC knowing what can happen to them both in general use, as well as on a boat.  One of the other concerning things was power draw.  Although a laptop can run and use a low wattage charger, I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of inverters and such running all of the time to keep my navigation system going.

In the end, I still bought PC software which I cover in a different post, but I bought a purpose-built chartplotter as my primary device.

I reviewed solutions from Raymarine and Garmin - I casually looked at a number of others, but due to the fact that I have had both Raymarine and Garmin products in the past, and also had a Raymarine autopilot, I wanted to keep in that family of products. 

I reviewed the Raymarine E and C series chartplotters, and after building an appropriate system that included future things I wanted to expand into (radar, etc.) I was surprised at the cost.  Several parts of the system were proprietary SeaTalk protocols when they really didn’t need to be.  Regardless, the system was very well designed and met my requirements.  I went to several local stores and reviewed the units in person, and was very impressed with their options.

I also reviewed the 4000 and 5000 series chartplotters from Garmin.  The 4000 series is a non-touch screen version of the 5000 series, which is touch-screen.  Both allow you to use both NMEA 0183/0183 High Speed, NMEA 2000, and the Garmin Networking protocols.  After reviewing these units in person as well, I opted for the Garmin GPSMAP 5208.

After reviewing both manufacturers, the Garmin had a lot of features I liked.  The touchscreen interface is the single best feature in the unit over the Raymarine.  I can touch the screen no matter what condition it’s in – wet, dirty fingers, etc.  No buttons taking up unit space, and very simple design of the interface.  Moving around in the maps was a concern to me, and even some of the store clerks said in detail mode they have seen it slow down.  So far in the month of use it’s had, I have only seen the display slow down when too many AIS targets are being tracked (in excess of 40!). 

Install was a breeze, and connecting it up to my multiplexer and AIS systems, as well as the GPS antenna it came with was easy.   Within an hour I had the system mounted and running. 

I also opted for the g2 Vision card for my area, which gave me more details on port entries, aerial photos, satellite maps, and guide information for creating courses, among other things.  A lot of this information is really nice to have when visiting a strange port.

The unit is well  made, and has plenty of connectors on the back for everything you would need.  The features within the software are great – tides, currents, locations, auto navigation, clear charts, and AIS support.  I have no complaints for the featureset at all.

The system has driven my autopilot and the other parts of the system without any problems so far.  It even has settings that match my Raymarine autopilot for naming waypoints – something that plagued me in past setups.

The only issues I’ve had with it include a whine when it’s been on for a while and has lots of AIS targets, and problems with the GPS coming on initially.   The whine I’ve traced to a fan within the unit that is trying to keep it cool.  This is not annoying too much, although listening to it overnight at an anchorage might be.   The amount of AIS data it has to track in Puget Sound, specifically Elliott Bay, is pretty amazing, so the whine is fine for me. 

The second issue is one I’m still researching.  So far 5 times when I’ve turned the circuit breaker on  for the whole system, and then powered on the unit, the GPS antenna hasn’t come on.  This antenna has 5 wires – 2 for power, 2 for NMEA into the chartplotter, and one for “remote power on” which I assume is the GPSMAP unit sending a signal to the antenna to come on.  I’m not sure if it’s something related to the Garmin version of software (v2.20) that it’s running, but I can’t find any updates or similar problems.  I’ll post more if I find out.

I am extremely happy with my purchase.  I have a unit that will drive my autopilot when motoring, uses a small amount of power when sailing, supports AIS for collision avoidance, and has a wealth of other features I’ve not even figured out yet.  The touchscreen interface is amazing, and I look forward to other devices that adopt this technology.

steve Electronics, Navigation 5208, AIS, chartplotter, g2 vision, garmin