AIS receiver

AIS receiver for the Raspberry Pi

This is very much a work in progress...

Installing the RTL_SDR software

2013-Nov-19

This information is a direct copy of my write-up for installing the same software for the ADS-B dump 1090 program.

sudo apt-get install git-core
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ~
sudo cp ./rtl-sdr/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo reboot
rtl_test
rtl_test -t (for E4000-based tuner)

If you get an error....

If, at this point, you get an error like:

Kernel driver is active, or device is claimed by second instance of librtlsdr.
In the first case, please either detach or blacklist the kernel module
(dvb_usb_rtl28xxu), or enable automatic detaching at compile time.

usb_claim_interface error -6
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0.

You should follow the steps here to stop Linux claiming the device for itself to use for broadcast reception.

Installing the AIS Decoder software

From: http://forum.aishub.net/ais-decoder/ais-decoder-beta-release/new/

The basic instructions are:

wget http://www.aishub.net/downloads/aisdecoder.tar.gz
tar zxvf aisdecoder.tar.gz
cd aisdecoder
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

At this point, the cmake command was not found, so I tried:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake

and then repeated the command:

cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This resulted in the error messages:

-- Build configuration: Release
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:54 (MESSAGE):
The development files for ALSA or PulseAudio are required - libasound-dev,
libpulse-dev

-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

So let's try installing those packages, but first remove the file which tells cmake which packages were found or not. If you don't do this, no amount of installing packages will help, and you can waste an entire morning chasing the problem, Been there, done that!

rm CMakeCache.txt
sudo apt-get install libasound-dev libpulse-dev
make

2013-Dec-10

Not sure what's happened (other than two reboots), but now running the cmake command works without errors:

-- Build configuration: Release
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /home/pi/AIS/aisdecoder/build

so next to link the radio receiver software with the AIS decoder program...

Updates

In 2022 I looked at newer software for this, and can recommend both the Airspy HF+ receiver, the AIS Catcher software, and the AIS Dispatcher software. This combination gives significantly better results than a COMAR AIS-3R dedicated AIS receiver.