Building from Source

Disclaimer

AIS-catcher is intended for hobbyist and research projects only. It is NOT approved for use in navigation or safety-of-life applications. Read the full disclaimer.

Building

The steps to compile AIS-catcher for RTL-SDR dongles are fairly straightforward on most systems. There are various options including a standard Makefile, a solution file for MSVC (see next section) and you can use cmake, as we will detail now.

The first step is to ensure you have the necessary dependencies and build tools installed for your device(s). For example, the following installs the minimum build tools for Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install git make gcc g++ cmake pkg-config libsqlite3-dev -y

For MacOS with brew installed:

brew update
brew upgrade

brew install git make gcc cmake pkg-config sqlite3

AIS-catcher requires libraries for the particular hardware you want to use. The following table summarizes the installation instructions for all supported hardware:

System	Linux/Raspberry	macOS	MSVC/vcpkg
Command	sudo apt install ...	brew install ...	vcpkg install ...
RTL-SDR	librtlsdr-dev	librtlsdr	rtlsdr rtlsdr:x64-windows
Airspy	libairspy-dev	airspy	-
Airspy HF+	libairspyhf-dev	airspyhf	-
HackRF	libhackrf-dev	hackrf	-
SDRplay 1A	API 3.x	-	API 3.x
SoapySDR	libsoapysdr-dev	-	-
ZeroMQ	libzmq3-dev	zeromq	ZeroMQ ZeroMQ:x64-windows
HTTP secure	libssl-dev	-	openssl openssl:x64-windows
ZIP	zlib1g-dev	-	zlib zlib:x64-windows

Once the dependencies are in place, the process of installing AIS-catcher on Linux-based systems becomes:

git clone https://github.com/jvde-github/AIS-catcher.git --depth 1
cd AIS-catcher
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

For the SDRPlay the software needs to be downloaded and installed from the website of the manufacturer. Once installed, the AIS-catcher build process automatically includes it in the build if available.

CMake options

The build system exposes a number of CMake options that can be passed to cmake .. (each defaults to ON unless noted otherwise):

Option	Effect
-DWEBVIEWER=OFF	Build a headless AIS-catcher without WebDB, WebViewer, and HTTPServer. The resulting binary is about 1.5 MB smaller; the -N flag and the server config key are gated off. Useful for backend / aggregator deployments that don't need the built-in web interface.

For example, to build a headless binary:

cmake -DWEBVIEWER=OFF ..
make

Microsoft Visual Studio 2019+

Ensure that you have vcpkg installed and integrated into Visual Studio via vcpkg integrate install (as Administrator). Then install the rtl-sdr drivers as follows:

vcpkg install rtlsdr rtlsdr:x64-windows ZeroMQ ZeroMQ:x64-windows soxr soxr:x64-windows

The included solution file in the mscv directory allows you to build AIS-catcher with RTL-SDR/ZMQ support in the Visual Studio IDE.

Running AIS-catcher

Once built and installed, there are two ways to run your station.

Managed mode — start AIS-catcher in managed mode:

AIS-catcher -E ~/aiscatcher.json 127.0.0.1:8118

Then open http://localhost:8118 in a browser — the setup wizard walks you through the configuration and starts the receiver. See Getting Around the Dashboard to monitor and fine-tune your station.

Manual mode — configure via command-line options, e.g. AIS-catcher -v 10:

Command Line Run