Meet TideMet at Seawork 2009

Ohmex will reappear at Seawork 2009 with, amongst other products, a new tide and weather station which transmits live data over standard marine Automated Identification Systems (AIS).The AIS TideMet system has been designed around a standard Aid to Navigation (AtoN) device developed for the marine industry by L3 Communications Inc. The transponder unit is a fully automated system. Once it has been installed and turned on, no maintenance is required to keep it operational. The only time the user needs to perform any function on the tranponder is to change the AtoN’s settings and local offset data as required.

This AtoN engine can be found within many derived AtoN products on the market. Ohmex has taken it and added electronics to measure tide and weather conditions. This data is processed and the message passed to the AtoN for transmission using the allocated time slot.

The AIS TideMet system is a Type 3 device (dual channel transmit and receive for autonomous mode). In use as a stand alone system, it is operated in ‘Real’ mode, making use of the position generated by the integrated DGPS unit.

The Port of Southampton already has an established software system for receiving, recording and storing its tide and met data. Data from remote sensor sites is transmitted over dedicated radio or wired links to the VTS centre, where the computer system quality controls the incoming data before distributing it over the internal Intranet system.

The AIS TideMet was interfaced with the long term project at the Port of Southampton for providing pilots with a truly portable navigation system using AIS as its basis. The requirement to monitor the port’s tide and weather conditions was seen as a natural extension to that project. In this case, software was written to intercept network messages from the Intranet system and broadcast these over the L3 AtoN, using the device purely as a local transmitter.

In hydrographic, marine civil engineering or dredging applications, the tide and met data can easily be captured on a low cost AIS receiver on all work vessels without the need for dedicated radio telemetry links. ‘Dynamic Under Keel’ passage planning for large, draught constrained commercial vessels will become a cost effective option for many ports, with consequent economic and safety benefits for port authorities, shipping operators, and other harbour users. To find out what AIS TideMet can do for you, visit the Ohmex stand at Seawork 2009.