If you're interested in building your own ship tracker, have I got an incomplete (but functioning!) quarantine boredom project for you:
https://github.com/mik3y/airdash
The hobbyist AIS tracking world seems to be a bit less popular than the plane tracking (ADS-B) world. I started the project above to try to build a common frontend where one could show both; mainly because there weren't any frontends I could find for AIS traffic.
If you just want to decode the data, try rtl-ais:
https://github.com/dgiardini/rtl-ais
I wrote up some quick instructions on getting it working on rasberry pi here:
https://github.com/mik3y/airdash/wiki/Running-RTL-AIS-on-Raspberry-Pi
And a dockerized version here:
https://github.com/mik3y/rtl-ais-docker
If you just want to decode the data, try rtl-ais:
I wrote up some quick instructions on getting it working on rasberry pi here: And a dockerized version here: