Introduction

Below is a description of my monitoring station for AIS (shipping) and ADS-B (aviation) signals.

This is slightly off-topic for this website, as readily available dedicated equipment is used in stead of converted receivers.

Antennas

The antennas are situated about 6 m above ground level. The utmost right antenna is a Wimo GP-1090 ADS-B antenna. Airborne beacons transmit at 1090 MHz. This antenna has a gain of about 5 dB for this frequency band.

Left of the GP-1090 you can see a CX-4. This marine VHF antenna is suited for 145 - 165 MHz, which is fine for AIS, using frequencies around 162 MHz.

The utmost left antenna is a Diamond D-777 for civil VHF and military UHF aviation bands. On its right, a dual band antenna for 144 and 430 MHz. If you look closely, an inverted V antenna for HF can be seen as well.

PCs

The PCs (network names 'Icarus' and 'Aurora') are two cheap, ex-thin client Fujitsu Siemens Futro S200 machines.

These PCs contain an 800 MHz processor. I have provided them with 256 Mb RAM and a 4 GB Compact Flash card as a hard drive. As these PCs don't have moving parts, they're absolutely silent. The energy consumption is low: about 10 - 15 W, which is nice for machines running 24/7.

The PCs run Windows 2000 Professional. Old, but very stable on these machines.

The PCs are controlled through a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch.

ADS-B / Mode-S

For ADS-B en Mode S airborne beacons, a Kinetic SBS-1 is used. Originally, this was the USB version; I have retrofitted it with an ethernet module. This receiver is connected to the GP1090 antenne with about 5 m Aircell-7 coax.

Through the Linksys WRT54GL switch/wireless bridge, the SBS-1 is connected to PC 'Icarus'. This PC runs the following software:

• Basestation. Kinetic's SBS-1 software
• PlanePlotter. If you registered PlanePlotter, you can see what other people receive by selecting the "Sharing' option, while other people can see the aeroplanes that you receive. For a small fee, or even for free provided that you are a regular uploader of raw data, you can use the unique multilateration feature. Some aircraft transmit Mode-S messages without position information. Provided that there are sufficient suitable users receiving such an aircraft, PlanePlotter can can determine the position using the arrival time of the Mode-S transmissions at each user.
• Multi-EM. This software enables multiple applications to connect to the SBS-1, e.g. Basestation and Ethernetovich
• Ethernetovich. This software intercepts the SBS-1's raw data. Needed if you want to act as a Master User for multilateration
• SBSPopulate. Gets aircraft registrations if they're not yet in the SBS-1 database
• Dimension 4. Synchronises the PC clock with an atomic clock. A prerequisite if you enable sharing in PlanePlotter.

AIS

• ShipPlotter. If you registered Shipplotter, you can see what other people receive by selecting the "Sharing' option, while other people can see the ships that you receive.
• Dimension 4. Synchronises the PC clock with an atomic clock. A prerequisite if you enable sharing in ShipPlotter.

Here you find a recent image that I received on the east side of Rotterdam.

Apart from ShipPlotter, I also share my received data with marinetraffic.com . My station's statistics can be found here