Comment by servercobra
2 days ago
This is pretty amazing to watch!
I did just watch a dot go through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, then take to the air and make a bee line straight to the Gulf of Mexico. Probably some weird artifact but made me chuckle.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
That is a real route though - The Great Loop, although I'm sure tankers aren't taking it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Loop
> Assuming a boat ("Looper") begins in Chicago, either take the Chicago River and Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, or the Cal-Sag Channel to the Des Plaines River. The waterway passes Joliet and soon becomes the Illinois River. The Illinois River travels west, through several locks, then southward, through Peoria. At Grafton, Illinois, the Illinois River joins the Mississippi River.
Of course you could start in the some Great Lake or the Erie Canal or anywhere else on the east coast.
kind of neat, but major problems with accuracy. I'm watching a signficant volume of traffic navigating the mountain ranges of northern BC, the Yukon and Alaska. I think something is messed with the browser rendering based on zoome level, and the map interactions.
I saw a few take a straight line across Africa from the west coast to the mediterranean.