Measures to counter AIS cheats set to be unveiled
“Radar harvesting” project may be the key to stopping vessels “going dark”.
An innovative project led by Australian researchers, environmental groups, and three major shipowners may make it possible to track and expose AIS cheats, reports TradeWinds.
Polluters, sanctions busters, smugglers, and ships wanting to pass through disputed waters routinely turn off their AIS systems, but the pilot project lead by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) may change all that.
Project leader Chris Wilcox declined to tell TradeWinds what shipping companies are involved, but did confirm that he is in the final stage of negotiating an agreement with three shipowners who operate fleets numbering in the hundreds.
The system relies upon volunteer vessels collecting and recording all radars signals in their area. Regulators and researchers can then collate the data to give a second source of vessel positioning data to supplement satellite data.
“We essentially use the ship as a sensor platform by adding on-board radar data storage,” wrote the CSIRO team, which is led by Wilcox and fellow principal scientist Denise Hardesty.
“Output of radar targets is a standard feature of ship systems; it is only a question of changing the settings to write this information to a storage device.”
