AIS Marine Tracking Sporadic E reports

[VK2KRR]

Brought to my attention yesterday by Phil VK5AKK were, two marine stations in Queensland at Cairns and Townsville who heard out to approx 3300 km double hop to a ship SW of Albany WA. Also shorter path into Melbourne. These are at 162 MHz keep in mind.

Carins station Es

[VK2KRR]

Geelong AIS E approx 0800 utc yesterday evening.

Geelong AIS E 16.12.11

[VK2KRR]

Also around the same time yesterday evening as the above Geelong AIS E reports, are also -

Lakes Entrance -

Lakes Entrance AISE

Bega -

Bega AISE

The Bega station actually had a few more this evening also.

[9A4CU]

Noticed long time ago that station from Eden (id 1221)has very poor performance .Running SLR 200N from 43 meters above sea level and catching just a few miles sounds strange ?!

[VK2KRR]

ZL3TY Sporadic E spots 29.12.12 -

ZL3TY Sporadic E 29.12.12

[VK2KRR]

I have been ocassionally watching the Okayama (Japan) AIS stations stats page. Ive noted that in the past he has had a number of very long distance sporadic signals. I wanted to try catch some of these on the map to see where they were going. I pressumed they may have been some sort of TEP signal toward Australia.

I may have been wrong, although what I am attaching on the map is only one signal, the others could well still be TEP.
On the map, you can see the direction is to the NE. I'd guess this is around 2780 Km, pressumably on double hop E's.

Okayama Map

Bigger spike on the distance graph would appear to be closer to 3700 km, but its to late to find this on the 24 hr map.

Okayama stats

Noting that on both instances on the 2 day graph, the signals occurred in the vicinity of the 0100 UTC area +- on both days. A 2nd peak at around 0300 utc on the first day.

[ZL4DK]

Occasionally I have noticed some weird anomolies on the Marinetraffic.com website. In the form of ships that seem to be in rediculous places with no obvious way of being received. Usually this spot also involves some corruption in the data and I am wondering what could be going wrong. Possibilities include a switch-on and transmission from an AIS transmitter before it has a valid GPS position to send (is this possible?) or some corruption of the data in the transmission to the Website, or maybe just a software issue on the website.

Yesterday I also noticed a ship suddenly appeared in the middle of an area well covered by my station and another station yet it was not recieved by either but instead by a more distant station. I thought it may be some similar error but the ship travelled up the coast as expected and continued not to appear on thé "recent receiptions view" of the 2 local stations. Is there a different standard of AIS transmission that not all recievers detect?

Regards
David ZL4DK

[VK6ADF]

Yes, some strange reports crop up from time to time. Like a cargo ship or tanker in the middle of Queensland which appeared a while ago. Don't know if it's false reporting from the ship or website errors.

I don't know if it is possible with the SLR 300, to also configure to send the data to another site as well. Then if it appears on one site and not the other you know it's a website error. If it is possible to set up a second IP address to send to then there are some sites that will eagerly accept your AIS data sent direct to an IP address. (Shipfinder is the one I send to).

[9A4CU]

You can find lot of strange vessel's position round the world every day.Some of them are constantly sending wrong data for some reason like those in Indonesian waters.It is not hard to find ships far inland or tiny river ships in south Atlantic etc.Although some far away spots are possible but we must be aware of...
Noticed it on another sites also like Fleetmon,Shipping Explore...not just at Marine Traffic site.

[VK2KRR]

From about the 2 min 10 sec mark in this video, I turn the AIS 2x 10 ele yagis to look into the Great Australian Bight and suddenly up pops a number of Sporadic E signals, caught live on video. There ends up being 355 signals in total from 14 vessels ranging from around 2165 km to a short as 959 km.

[VK2KRR]

On Christmas day 25.12.15, just after lunch, my 162 MHz Marine tracking station was able to pick up a number of sporadic E spots.

My 162 MHz marine tracking system runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it doesn't hit 'pay day' very often, but it does pay off sometimes. I was at the parents for Christmas lunch, but when I came home this evening, I was greeted with a number of long range sporadic E spots recorded on the system

2 x 10 element yagi's were set up ready beaming into the great Australian bight.

As shown in the WSPR database, just before and during the 162 MHz opening, the 6m WSPR short range signals were very intense. And my 6m yagi was beaming toward Alice Springs.

6m WSPR data

The first 162 MHz marine tracking, sporadic E signal was decoded here at 0107 UTC. The last signal was heard nearly 40 mins later at 0146 UTC. This is 1207 to 1246 pm local time. There were 270 spots logged in total.

Here is a map of where all the ships heard were located -

162 MHz Sporadic E ship positions

Uploads sent to DX maps-

DX Maps AIS page uploads

The maximum was 1832 km. West from here. Would have paid to have 2m WSPR running.

[VK5BC]

Hi Leigh

Interesting reports. At 0125 UTC I worked Colin VK5DK (Mt Gambier) on 6m E's at 5/9+, a rare short skip 464Km contact on E's and in the timeframe of your reports. VK3's were also extremely strong at that time. I did have 2m running as I thought it should have been open to somewhere but nothing heard. Of course being Xmas day like most I could not give it my full attention.

73's Brian
VK5BC

[VK2KRR]

Hi Brian, thanks for your observations from that time.
You probably had a 2m path there, but maybe landing in the ocean like my Marine tracking spots.
Wish I had my 2m set up running.

Maybe something again today.