Next-generation satellite AIS on FleetMon.com, today

On July 14 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral with six next-generation AIS satellites on board.

FleetMon.com is pleased to announce that the additional AIS vessel tracking power delivered by these satellites is made fully available to users of the FleetMon platform as of today.

This newly expanded constellation of our satellite AIS partner ORBCOMM marks the largest and most powerful constellation existing today, and addresses a number of previous limitations faced when tracking vessel from space.

In addition to having more satellites detecting ship signals in space, also the number of ground stations has been vastly increased. Now ORBCOMM’s entire network of 16 ground stations is engaged, one on every continent of the globe, and ensures much more frequent downloads of the AIS messages received in space.

As a result, FleetMon users benefit from a dramatically reduced latency time and a strongly increased update rate of ship signals received from the open oceans. The overall data volume received by the satellites has easily tripled, and the ship signals from deep ocean position are displayed on FleetMon users’ screens in no more than 5-10 minutes.

Thanks to enhanced receiver technology with increased sensitivity, the new satellites detect more messages in high traffic areas and more vessels by detecting positions from lower powered transponders such as Class B transponder messages. There is also an increase in detection of AIS messages transmitted at lower data rates, such as from vessels at anchor, and static data reports, for example destination or ETA messages.

With these new capabilities, combined with FleetMon’s own terrestrial AIS network data, users are able to track vessels more accurately and precisely than has ever been possible before — with a further 11 satellites planned for deployment in late 2014!

Interested? Sign-up for a free trial of our satellite-enabled plans on FleetMon.com and get a first-hand experience of the new data quality, or talk to our sales team to discuss your project!