Arctic tracking technology: mariners gain from Alaskans.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: Telecom & Technology

Alaska has one of the most extensive vessel tracking systems in the world, covering 1.3 million square miles of water. Along the 6,640 miles of coastline in Alaska, the Marine Exchange of Alaska has installed 120 vessel tracking receiving sites from the Beaufort Sea to the Aleutian Islands and Southeast Alaska.

Constant Monitoring

From a quiet office in Juneau, twenty employees maintain the system and keep track of every transponder-carrying vessel in Alaska waters, around the clock. The employees are largely former US Coast Guard workers or others familiar with the maritime industry. If they notice a vessel that hasn't moved in a while or one behaving erratically, they might be the first to make a call to the Coast Guard, advising them of a potential problem.

The Exchange is a nonprofit organization created in 2000 to "provide valuable safety, navigational, and logistics information to the maritime community and provide a virtual 'safety net' that also contributes daily to the efficiency of maritime operations," according to its website.

They use satellite and Automatic Identification Systems, or AIS, technologies to accomplish that goal, founder Paul Fuhs says. The system has been online since 2005.

"The accuracy of those receivers can be plus or minus three meters," Fuhs says. "We know within ten feet where a vessel is. We can tell which end of the boat the transponder is on. And we receive a position update every six seconds."

All that data is housed on a large server in Juneau, with backups in the Lower 48. The immediate data is used by the Coast Guard to assist with search and rescue operations.

"It changes the way you do business," says Paul Webb, manager of the 17th Coast Guard District's Operations Center.

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Created on the Back of a Napkin

Fuhs, who was mayor of Dutch Harbor at the time, and Coast Guard Captain Ed Page created the Exchange on the back of a napkin over dinner, after discussing lives lost at sea and how to make Alaska waters safer for mariners.

The pair patterned the Exchange on similar vessel tracking exchanges in the Lower 48. International vessels were already equipped with transponders sending out longitude and latitude. But, at the time, those signals were not being picked up in Alaska waters.

"They were all transmitting, but there was nothing here to receive them by," Fuhs says.

In the Lower 48, the vessel tracking systems were mostly built and maintained by the Coast Guard, Webb says. Fuhs...