Does FloatHub store and forward AIS if it does not have a live connection?

Your FloatHub device will not store and forward AIS data if it does not have an immediate network connection when the AIS data arrives. There are three reasons why:

  1. By design, AIS is fundamentally a live system. There is no notion of a “time stamp” in the protocol. Any information which appears in an AIS stream is implicitly happening right now, not at some time in the past. Thus while it may be useful to know where vessels were at some time in the past, there is no agreed upon way to pass historical AIS data around.
  2. Relaying stale AIS data to other systems could lead to confusion and possibly dangerous misinformation about current vessel traffic.
  3. With enough targets around, AIS data can pile up very quickly. Even a few minutes worth could exceed the storage capacity of your FloatHub device (and the main purpose of that memory is to keep track of data about your vessel, not AIS targets that happen to be in your vicinity).