For any government agency that needs to track more than just the larger commercial ships in its waters, AIS and VMS mandates do not address the huge population of smaller vessels of interest. This leaves the vast majority of boats in their waters as ‘dark targets’, ultimately spreading an agency’s resources too thin to monitor all of its EEZ.  

exactTrax-enabled AIS transponders combined with exactEarth’s comprehensive satellite coverage, provides a low cost standards-based solution for tracking of small fishing boats and small commercial vessels in any part of a country’s EEZ.

For more information about exactTrax, please contact our sales team at: sales@exactearth.com.

AIS is a Very High Frequency (VHF) technology primarily optimised and designed for high intensity terrestrial-based tracking with reliable range typically limited to approximately 50 nautical miles.  High powered Class A type transceivers are able to be tracked globally by the existing exactEarth AIS satellite network, however due to a variety of complex reasons, transmissions from standard Class B type devices cannot currently be reliably tracked from space.

The reception of Class B units from space has been traditionally hindered because Class B units are designed to always show deference to Class A devices.  Class B units transmit less frequently at a lower power level.  As Class A populations increase within a satellite footprint, the Class B transmissions become indistinguishable from the general noise floor.  By utilising patented exactEarth Satellite AIS signal processing techniques, exactTrax allows terrestrial and satellite tracking of these small vessels without requiring expensive equipment and per-bit message charges for the ship owner.   

exactTrax is a unique technology which, when embedded within standard low-powered AIS transponders, enables their transmissions to be consistently received by exactEarth satellites. This allows wide-area tracking of these vessels and also enables the provision of valuable supplementary AIS tracking data to existing terrestrial networks with limited coverage.

exactTrax represents the most cost-efficient and comprehensive solution to monitor all of the world’s shipping, regardless of vessel size and location.

For more information on exactTrax, contact our sales team at sales@exactearth.com