AIS Y-tronic Bluetooth Connector

October 15th, 2006 by JCB
Posted in Articles, Technical and Training | No Comments »

Y-tronic AIS Bluetooth connector.

As mentioned in The Pilot (April issue 285) Y-Tronic have developed hardware to provide wireless communication between a ship’s pilot plug and a pilot’s laptop. The equipment was sent to Milford Haven for practical trials and the following is a report on the unit by Milford Haven pilot, Ed Neale.

The hardware consists of the following:

· Blue tooth transmitter

· USB battery

· A cable to connect the battery to the transmitter.

· A cable to connect the transmitter to the pilot plug

· 240v USB charger for the battery pack

With a weight of 350g the equipment, less the USB charger, was carried quite comfortably in my pilot coat pocket. Setting up the cables is a little complicated, and although incorporating the battery within the transmitter would make the unit bigger it would reduce the complexity of the set up procedure. Once all items were connected the signal was received by the laptop without problems. The battery can be charged by several means and the level of charge can be monitored at the touch of a button.

The data from the pilot plug includes own vessel’s position, dimensions, heading etc. although the amount and quality of data depends on the installation on board. Other vessels AIS data is also received. The presentation of the data will depend on the software used. For the trial I had a demonstration version of Y-Tronic’s own software. This gave a display similar to a radar with targets plotted according to their range and bearing. Triangles indicated the approximate ship’s heading of the targets.

It was possible to display targets in list format, in order of distance from own ship. Again this is similar to the display option on many AIS receivers fitted to ships today. The demo version of the software would not run for more than a few minutes so it was not possible to fully assess the reliability of the data being received. A more useful display may include an electronic chart display, with AIS targets overlaid onto the chart. This is the format we are currently using at Milford, with QASTOR software supplied by QPS. This software plots other AIS targets as ship’s outlines, having received the dimensions, position and heading of targets from the AIS data stream. Unfortunately I was unable to configure this software to run with the Y-Tronic hardware because of the QASTOR version in use at Milford. It was disappointing to note that the YTronic software could not be run on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) which would offer a system that could be carried in a pilot’s coat pocket. Milford Haven pilots are issued with PDAs and I was able to establish a connection with the Blue tooth transmitter but was unable to make use of the data.

To sum up, the Y-Tronic system provides a robust, low cost means of providing AIS information to a pilot’s laptop unit. The hardware could be simplified into one unit containing the transmitter, battery and pilot plug connector which would reduce set up times, an important factor in any equipment regularly used by pilots.

Consideration of PDA based software would make the system more portable and user specific.

Ed Neale

Y-tronic: www.y-tronic.com

email: info@y-tronic.com