Weatherdock AG: Cost effective AIS vessel management system
IUU occurs not only in high seas, but also in the exclusive economic zones of coastal States by national and foreign vessels and in river and inland fisheries. However, in marine fisheries, while it is difficult to estimate precisely the total IUU catch in tonnage or value terms, the level of IUU fishing has reached major proportions for some species. These catches, in many cases, are being made by both authorized and non-authorized fishers, Weatherdock AG press release said.
IUU fishing undermines national and regional efforts to conserve and manage fish stocks and, as a consequence, inhibits progress towards achieving the goals of long-term sustainability and responsibility.
Moreover, IUU fishing greatly disadvantages and discriminates against those fishers that act responsibly, honestly and in accordance with the terms of their fishing authorizations. This is a compelling reason why IUU fishing must be dealt with expeditiously and in a transparent manner. How to get this phenomen under control?
The state of the art technology which is used to control, monitor and overcome the existing problems of IUU is a technology which is used at commercial vessels for traffic monitoring since 2000, which is a technology called “AIS”. “AIS” stands for “Automatic Identification System” for vessels.
AIS transponders, mounted on vessels, automatically transmit the position and velocity of the ship at regular intervals via a VHF radio built into the AIS. The position and velocity originate from an integral GPS receiver.
Other information, such as the vessel name and VHF call sign, is entered when installing the equipment. The signals are received by AIS transponders fitted on other ships or on land based monitoring systems.
In order to ensure that the VHF transmissions of different AIS transponders do not occur at the same time they are time multiplexed.
This “AIS” technology is also ideal to be used for monitoring small fishing vessels. A small simple transmitter, like the size of a smartphone, but slightly thicker transmits the actual position of the small fishing vessel. The transmitter is battery driven and can last before recharge up to 5 days. Alternatively it can also be connected to the battery of the vessel or the generator of the vessel.
With that device, the local authorities as the Boarder Guard, the Coast Guard of the Ministry of fishing can monitor the activities of the fisherman in the economic zones of the coastal states.
In addition, this system is also used an intelligent tracking system that fulfills all requirements for naval border security. Tracking and identifying objects are big needs for authorities and to know “friend or foe” will minimize terror risks.
As an example – Malaysia has got such a system already in use with products from Germany, from the company Weatherdock. Malaysia did decide for these devices due to reliability, high end technology and certification expertise these devices do have. Weatherdock is the world market leader in small vessel tracking devices.
About Weatherdock AG
Germany headquartered Weatherdock Cooperation was founded in 2003 and today is the world leader in AIS based, commercial vessels approved, personal locator beacons in the VHF band. The Company was named four times in a row among the best 100 midsize companies in Germany and was Winner of the 2018 Bavarian Export Award in Category “Industry”.