# Share your AIS receiver on AIS Fleet

Feed what your own AIS receiver hears into AIS Fleet. Add a receiver on aisfleet.com, point it at the address you are given over UDP, and watch it go live. Free on every plan, and private to you.

Every vessel on the AIS Fleet map is there because a receiver somewhere heard her. If you have an AIS receiver of your own, aboard your boat or on a shore mast, it can join that network. What it hears is drawn on the map for every member, feeds the departure and arrival notices, and fills the gaps no other receiver covers, which is often the water right around you.

Sharing is free on every plan, with no limit on how many receivers you add. A receiver is private to you: other members never see its name, its position or that it exists, and nothing on AIS Fleet says which receiver reported a vessel.

## Add a receiver

1. Open [aisfleet.com/stations](https://aisfleet.com/stations) and sign in if asked. It is also **AIS receivers** in the account menu.
2. Choose **Add a receiver** and give it a name you will recognise, such as "Masthead" or "Shore mast".
3. Choose **Add receiver**.

## Point the receiver at us

The page now shows you a host, a port and the protocol, UDP. Enter them in the network output settings of whatever holds your receiver's data. Any receiver, plotter, multiplexer or program that can forward NMEA 0183 sentences to a network address will do, and most can:

- An AIS receiver, a transponder or an NMEA Wi-Fi gateway with a network connection usually has a **UDP output** or **send to** setting. Enter the host and the port there.
- In OpenCPN, add a network connection of type UDP with the host and port, and turn on output for it.
- An AIS dispatcher program, or a small computer running a receiver of its own, takes the host and port as a UDP destination.

Send the AIS sentences as they come from the receiver. They begin with `!AIVDM`, and with `!AIVDO` for your own boat when the receiver is a transponder; she counts as a vessel like any other. If your GPS sentences travel on the same feed, they tell us where the receiver is listening from, and that position is shown only to you. Anything else on the feed, depth or wind for instance, is ignored.

The host and port are not secret the way a password is. Open the receiver on the **AIS receivers** page at any time to read them again. If you want a different port, remove the receiver and add another.

> [!TIP]
> Give the forwarder only the AIS sentences if it lets you choose. Everything else travels for nothing, and on a metered connection at sea that is data you pay for.

If you use the AIS Fleet app on your phone to share the receiver aboard, the app pairs that receiver by itself and it appears in this list too, marked as the app's. You can rename it, switch it off or remove it here like any other.

## Is it working?

Each receiver's row tells you:

- **Live**, with the number of vessels heard in the last 24 hours, once data has arrived within the last ten minutes.
- **Last heard** and a time, when it has gone quiet.
- **Waiting for the first data**, when nothing has arrived yet.

The page updates on its own while it is open, and the first data shows within about a minute of your receiver starting to send. If it stays waiting, check the three things behind nearly every case: the host and port were entered exactly as shown, the output is UDP rather than TCP, and the receiver is actually hearing traffic, because a receiver on a bench with no antenna has nothing to forward. A live receiver with a vessel count of zero means the connection works and no vessel is within range at the moment.

## Who sees what

Nobody but you sees the receiver. The vessels it hears become part of what AIS Fleet knows: they are drawn for every member, they feed the departure and arrival notices, and they are included in the vessel data we license, as section 3 of the [Terms](https://aisfleet.com/terms/#shared-receivers) sets out. That permission covers reports already sent and continues if you stop sharing. It is the same arrangement every contributing receiver network works on, and it is what makes the map worth having.

Switch a receiver off when it is out of use for a season and on again when it returns; its record stays. Remove it and its coverage record goes with it, though vessels it already reported stay on the map. Closing your account removes every receiver you were running.

> [!NEXT]
> That is the whole of AIS Fleet. If you also log your own boat with Saillogger, the rest of this guide is about that side, starting with what it costs and how to pause it for the winter: [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md).