Wake

Watch live marine vessel traffic on your map. Wake streams real-time AIS ship positions into QGIS and shows vessels moving — track your current map view, or draw an area to watch. Wake shows live traffic only; it does not replay history.

Wake is one of three sibling plugins built on the same live-tracking engine — a pluggable data-source layer, a moving-point map layer, clustering and identify — covering sea, sky and space:

• Wake — marine vessels (this one)
• Contrail — aircraft (ADS-B)
• Zenith — satellites

Features

• Area-based, not MMSI-based — watch all traffic in your map view or a drawn box, not just ships you already know.
• Multiple data sources — pick a provider in the panel; more can be added without touching the map or UI:
  • aisstream.io — global reach, free account and API key (you supply your own).
  • Open Waters (aiscast) — open volunteer network, free token (positions only, no ship types).
  • Digitraffic — Finland and the Baltic, no key required.
• Class A and Class B — cargo and tankers and the smaller fishing/leisure craft that Class-A-only tools miss.
• Rich vessel detail — coloured by ship type, rotated by heading, with name, flag/country, speed, destination and dimensions. Click a vessel to Identify it, with one-click links out to MarineTraffic and VesselFinder.
• Cluster badges — busy harbours collapse into a single marker with a count; zoom in and they fan out into individual vessels.
• Show only moving vessels — one toggle hides moored and anchored craft (by speed over ground), so you see just what is under way.
• Resilient — auto-reconnects after a laptop sleep or network drop; no extra dependencies (uses Qt's built-in WebSocket), so it installs cleanly from the QGIS plugin repository.

Pairs naturally with SeaState US: vessel movement and coastal conditions in one map.

Screenshots

Identify any vessel for its full AIS detail and flag, with links out to MarineTraffic / VesselFinder:

Global reach — a lone tanker tracked far off the Somali coast:

Install

1. Download this repository as a ZIP (or clone it).
2. In QGIS: Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Install from ZIP, and select the wake/ folder zipped, or copy wake/ into your QGIS plugins directory.
3. Enable Wake in the plugin list. A Wake panel appears on the right.

Usage

1. In the Wake panel, choose a Source and click Configure… to enter a key/token if the provider needs one (Digitraffic needs none).
2. Choose Track the current map view or Draw an area on the map.
3. Click Start tracking. Vessels stream in and move in real time. Pan or zoom and the watched area follows.

Data sources and coverage

Wake is only as good as the feed behind it, and free AIS feeds are terrestrial and volunteer-fed — dense around Europe and North America, sparse or empty elsewhere (for example, the Persian Gulf and much of Asia). Open-ocean and low-coverage regions need commercial satellite AIS, which Wake does not ship with. Digitraffic covers Finnish/Baltic waters only. All sources are live; Wake does not store or replay history.

Layout

wake/
  metadata.txt          QGIS plugin metadata
  __init__.py           classFactory entry point
  wake_plugin.py        dock panel, area selection, start/stop, status, clustering + moving filter
  vessels.py            live vessel layer, batched updates, styling, ship-type memory
  config_dialog.py      schema-driven provider configuration dialog
  mid.py                MMSI -> flag/country lookup
  providers/
    base.py             AisProvider abstraction + normalised vessel contract
    aisstream.py        aisstream.io and Open Waters providers (Qt WebSocket)
    digitraffic.py      Digitraffic provider (keyless REST polling)
    __init__.py         provider registry

Requests

Want a specific AIS provider added? I'm happy to add one. Ping me at peter.cotroneo.qgis@gmail.com with the source and I'll take a look.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later.