ShipXplorer AIS Dongle, Blue

Purchased in order to set up a receiver station to relay AIS to MarineTraffic.com. I was able to receive well using the matching ShipXplorer AIS antenna and running AIS catcher under Windows 10. Follow installation instructions for SDR sharp first and you will have all needed drivers in place. Once AIS catcher is working, install AIS Decoder to decode the messages and relay to your favorite ship tracker or openCPN. I did find that this dongle is nothing more than a standard SDR device, but is frequency corrected, so you should not need to use an -p offset in configurations. The most critical thing in setup is antenna placement. I needed to experiment with several locations before finding the right place. Mounting high, away from interference and as close as possible to target traffic areas is what worked best for me. Many class B AIS transponders are only 2 watts, and have a max range of 15 miles, and a more realistic range of 5-7 miles. Don’t expect placing an antenna 10-20 miles from traffic will get great results. When looking for a home for equipment, try local marinas, they might be happy to let you use their Wi-Fi and roof to get boats on the map. Lastly, I’m using Google Remote Desktop to manage the little laptop that hosts the AIS dongle. This allows me to leave the laptop on site as a receiver, but monitor and control it from my cell phone or any computer easily. Happy receiving! KE8QQG

Device packaging makes false claims about easy setup, and does not call out that they only support Raspberry Pi devices.

arrived on schedule.. working fine up to now

I have not been able to get the unit working. I contacted their support, received one email, I had already done the suggestions they sent and replied. I never had any more follow up from them after sending a couple messages. I own other AIS Dongles and never had any problems with setup.

Poor reception compared to other SDR sticks.

Utter waste of manufacturing and time. Screen display is 25% obscured by Ads, and upgrades to AdFree are expensive. This is Public Data they are repackaging. It only displayed 10% of Ships compared to Marine Traffic dot com, a free service. The public would be best served by it's removal from existence.

Using with AIS-catcher on a Raspberry Pi 4B to feed a number of sites including ShipXplorer. The Pi also hosts an ADSB dongle that also feeds several sites. The CPU usage is about 10%. I put both dongles on a powered USB hub to eliminate voltage drop issues. It took a few hours of research to understand how to install and configure the software and since then it's worked well. Antenna placement and gain tuning are key to good reception.

Excellent product although there is a little information to connect it