GNSS & AIScatcher on RaspberryPi4 – Telecommunications, Navigation & Electronics

Introduction

In the previous post I looked at using AIScatcher along with GNSS to plot position and AIS contacts on OpenCPN (Ref.1). AIScatcher is very sensitive and I even managed to pick us contacts at my home location which is surrounded by massive steel condos and is distant from the harbour. In this post I look at using the same configuration but on RaspberryPi4B instead.

Equipment Block Diagram

Figure 1 shows the equipment block diagram. I am using the RPi4B in a headless configuration with ethernet over my home router. My desktop pc provides the screen, mouse and keyboard. I use VNC viewer to access the RPi4B desktop. In order to install AIS-catcher I used the installation script provided on the GitHub manual page and ran it from a terminal (Ref.2). Installation takes several minutes. There is a separate GUI for setting up the various parameters and this is also installed from a script. I just used the command line from a terminal as I did in the previous post with windows. You can list the various commands by:
$AIS-catcher -h
To start the service I used:
$AIS-catcher -u 127.0.0.1 10110
This sends the UDP received packets to the local host at port 10110 to be shown by OpenCPN as shown in Figure 3.

Fig.2 AIS-catcher Installation Script

Reception Results on OpenCPN

Fig.4 GPS Position & AIS Contacts Shown OpenCPN Toronto Harbour

For this blog post I downloaded and installed the latest Raspbian image (Debian 64bit “bookworm”) for RaspberryPi4 using Raspberry Pi Imager (Ref.3). Since OpenCPN is no longer available in the Software add/remove, I installed FLATPAK and downloaded OpenCPN from Flatpak Hub (Ref.4). Figure 4 shows the multiple signals received even though I am located far from the harbour.