Marine Traffic is a Greek AIS vessel tracking portal developed by the Aegean University. Benefits from marinetraffic.com are:

• it is free
• provides detailed vessel information
• excellent services

The AIS coverage is very good, currently there are 20000 vessels in the database and more than 500 AIS stations (20-30% of them offline).

Marine Traffic provides good statistics to check the effectiveness of the AIS antenna and receiver: covered area, number of vessels, average radius of coverage, etc.

The database contains particulars of each vessel and picture if available. MarineTraffic also keep the story of the ship – the track and itineraries. The users may subscribe for receiving of alerts by e-mail or SMS. The alerts are generated on the following events:

• by selected port – the arrival and departure of all ships;
• by selected vessel – on the hit or out of the reach of AIS receivers, as well as the arrival / exit from the specified port;

Another service that we mentioned – the possibility to embed a map to your site. Marinetraffic.com can create KML files to import in Google Earth, but I did not like working in Google Earth, because program is strongly hindered by the large number of constantly updated data for vessel tracking.