AIS Setup on 0.15.1

[felizcortez]

I did a complete re-install on my pi 3 yesterday.
Installed  RPI v0.10.0 NOOBS
Updated Raspian
Updated openplotter to 15.1

When I now ran calibration of SDR I got -37 ppm. Tried again after the SDR had warmed up and got -38 ppm.
With this ppm setting I did not get a single ship on the AIS. I remembered that the calibration had been around +48 ppm before, so I used this and voila!

(OpenCPN is running on my phone and I send the AIS and GPS data over bluetooth :-)

I conclude that there is something wrong with the calibration software...

If there are boats with AIS-transmitters in your harbour, then I guess you will be able to pick them up with the supplied antenna, but it is designed for a completely different frequency.

I have tested the following antennas:
http://www.metzcommunication.com/manta6.htm
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2016-NEW...87854.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2016-New...38821.html

The big expensive works best, but the small cheap ones from aliexpress works OK if you use a ground plane for the antenna (fasten the antenna to a metal plate).

Thanks for the reply.  I'm wondering if it's calibration related as well.  The negative number confused me.  If I just leave the gain value alone since it's maxed out at 49.6 then step through the ppm values starting at say 5 then working my way up one by one.  Does the channel or anything else need to be set to anything, and can I just enable AIS and expect to see something show up in OpenCPN?

Also I believe the connector on the DVB-T dongle is an MCX connector, does that sound correct? So I'd need a converter to BNC or whatever is on the actual antenna.  I'm thinking I might be able to unplug my onboard VHF radio from the antenna it uses to test this out, but I'll need a converter for the connector.  

i like what you did with transmitting GPS and AIS targets via BLE so you can run openCPN natively on your phone.  I'm planning on doing this headless and am not quite happy with interacting via VNC on the phone - it works well on the laptop, but the phone experience isn't as good.  Were there some instructions you followed on how to set this up?