AIS Receivers and Transponders

[Peter Roach]

Which AIS transceiver did you guys purchase?

[Soggy Geek]

After lots of agonizing between the Vesper Marine 850 Transceiver, which was designed by a sailing cruiser for cruisers and the Amec, which is the cheapest thing on the market in a transceiver, but requires you to be running your PC or chartplotter all the time to get the benefit of the receiver part, we chose the Vesper.

I'll let you know whether I thought the extra expense was worth it by the time we complete our first passage in April.

[Doug Vaughn]

Needed to upgrade my VHF anyway so I went with the Standard Horizon AIS enabled GX2100. I think about $290.00 online.
Here is the info...
Note:To show AIS targets on the GX2100 and on the RAM3 display a GPS must be connected.

• Integrated dual channel AIS receivers with one VHF antenna connection
• AIS target display: MMSI, Call Sign, Ship Name, BRG, DST, SOG and COG
• Contact AIS Ship with DSC
• CPA (Closest Point of Approach) Alarm
• 80dB Commercial grade receiver

[RHoodJr]

Doug,  We are, as they say, in the same boat you were.  Thanks for the great review on the GX2100.  Looks like a great option as a stand alone or even a great back-up ais receiver.

Did you buy from Hodges Marine?

[Doug Vaughn]

Richard, I've had the unit for a year and love it so far. I did have to get a Standard Horizon Smart GPS antenna for it to work with my Raymarine C70 Classic. Apparently, Raymarine had a proprietary AIS sentence that made my chartplotter unable to receive info from the VHF so I had to add the antenna. Don't mind though as it gives me a back-up system. Maybe we should move this topic out of the classified forum section....

[Clement]

Going coastal AIS
There is a app for cell phones for an AIS works great, but of course you have to be with in cell range which, I plan on being coastal for most of my cruising.   (Boat beacon $9.95) will be on the Tombigbee for a few months.
Clement

[Matthew Balch]

I installed AIS on the boat recently, and I really like it!  I was surprised at how many vessels are using AIS. (of course, it is required for ships, but many pleasure craft have it too)  The system can overlay the position of these vessels on your chartplotter's map and give you other information as to the vessels' name, speed, course, destination, location of the impending collision and rate of course change if any.  This will be particularly helpful in busy shipping lanes like the Gulf Stream or crossing the Chesapeake Bay in rain or fog.

The installation was pretty simple.  My boat has 2 Garmin chartplotters, so I purchased a Garmin "black box" unit that connects to the existing VHF radio antenna and to the chartplotters by way of a NMEA 2K network backbone.  Put power to the black box and the NMEA 2K backbone, hook the chartplotters to the network, and you're good to go.  No programming is required.

In my opinion, if you are considering acquiring an AIS system it might be a good idea to buy one that is fully compatible with the existing equipment on your boat like I did to make installation easy and not have to reinvent the wheel.  I am not advocating any particular brand and other folks may prefer navigating with a laptop or having a separate AIS screen, but I found that sticking with the equipment on board and buying a black box that integrates with what you have works great and reduces the amount of clutter on board.

Matthew

[S/V Kuleana]

I purchased a Vesper XB-8000. Our SH GX2150 VHF has an AIS receiver built in but I wanted for the big ships to "see" us. The Vesper XB-8000 is an AIS Class B transponder that is also a NMEA <-> WiFi b/g bridge and has an AIS MOB alarm. We have Ocean Signal MOB1 AIS PLBs on our life vests, I want to leverage NMEA 2000 to get AIS to my Nav PC and WiFi to get AIS/GPS to my Android tablet so the Vesper XB-8000 was on a very short list when it came time to Class B AIS transponders that had the suite of features that I wanted.

~Wm Jones
S/V Kuleana
CSY 37 Hull Number 82

[SVTrinity]

After last summers storage, my beloved Furuno GP32 refused to power up. Looking for a replacement, I chose a Matsutec HP-528A marine GPS AIS transponder. I am very happy. Avoiding the issues with sharing the mast VHF antennae, I split the FM radio aerial. I can see out to 40 nm easily. I plan on integrating into my old/new to Trinity raymarine pathfinder radar plotter via nmea and will update on success. Should  be plug and play. Total cost with shipping from aliexpress under $300. Includes new GPS antennae, cabling, bracket, cover, etc.

IMPORTANT, Make sure it's the AIS version. Read the description and there will be four connections on the back: power, nmea, gps, and vhf (for ais).

[SVTrinity]

Successfully connected to Pathfinder raymarine radar plotter via nmea 0183 outputs. Only tricky bit was grounding the tx side of the rl80c  (yellow wire) rather than just connecting to rx side of the matsutec. Next up is connecting ais output to opencpn laptop (Panasonic toughbook), followed by vhf radio for dsc capability.