Ann: First Lithium Shipment Boosts NAL Revenues, page-67

Where is the AAL Moon?

I keep seeing posts about this, so I thought I'd explain how ships positions are updated.

Commercial boats (fishing, charters, container ships) generally use a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System), whereby your registered ID and some data (name, position, heading, speed, size) is transmitted over UHF (line of sight). The purpose of AIS is not for global tracking of boats, but to stop them going bump in the night.

When you have an AIS transceiver on your boat, you can set up perimeter alarms so that if another boat crosses the boundary, or its calculated heading will cross your geo-fence, then it will alert you so that you can either observe, or make heading corrections, or just get on the radio and ensure the other boat has seen you and acknowledged your position. But AIS can be turned off at the captain's discretion, i.e. not to broadcast your fishing spot, or not to alert pirates to your position etc.

Generally ports have an AIS receiver so port authority can also observe any boats coming and going, and this is generally the source of the data that the various ship tracking sites show (for free). So when a boat is out of sight of a port, its position will no longer be updated by the AIS system.

Obviously there are other technologies that a boat may employ to update position via satellite, but these data feeds are not free, so if you what global ship tracking, you're going to have to pay for it.

So don't be concerned that the AAL Moon has stopped moving, or its position hasn't been updated in a week, it just means it's been out of sight of a port.