It's a sensitive issue I know, but it's time we had the conversation: transponders.
Yesterday was something of a double whammy, because not only did we spot that shiny Class 69 locomotive at the docks but we got to see this too, didn't we Gromit?
It was there late morning, but gone when I returned later in the afternoon; in fact a screen-shot from vessel-finder's website reveals it left at 12:18 precisely.
So let's hear it for Benny Peterssen.
It was he that evolved the idea of information exchange for shipping, which would only become mandatory for merchant fleets after the 9/11 attacks. Based principally on satellites, AIS is invaluable to the UK: Central Park when it comes to brokerage and insurance.
The system is called AIS or Automatic Identification System, although aircraft have long used transponders to transmit flight information to radar heads. A 'radar-head' is a rotating dish for transmission or receipt of radio signals, and not a fan of these systems per se.
Back in the 1990s aircraft transponders (developed originally from IFF or Identification Friend or Foe) it became ADS-B, or the snappy Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast system that the likes of FlightRadar24 relies upon.
Interestingly naval ships in the UK are fitted with aircraft transponders, presumably because the helicopters and jets that they host have them fitted too, such that they are all singing shanties from the same hymn-sheet.
I only noticed this on the final approach over the sea to Barcelona, when the nav display in front of me 'flagged up' a contact that appeared to be at or around sea-level, and therefore not ~ as you would hope ~ an imminent collision risk.
Our adoptive ship meantimes is bound for Halifax in Canada, and currently off the southwest coast of Ireland.
God speed, me hearties!
(Ed. Pathetic, but the sad bastard once considered a career in the merchant navy.)
