Low-cost AIS Transponder using an SDR device

With the advance of technology, several equipment that were expensive in the past are relatively cheap nowadays. One of this equipment is the Software Defined Radio (SDR). SDRs can transform expensive equipment available on the market into simple, cheap and easy to build computer applications. One of latter is the Automatic Information System (AIS). Because AIS is an equipment of great importance to the safety of navigation and it's not compulsory for small vessels, if there's a way of making it cheaper and accessible for everyone, it would have many advantages. On this paper we propose a creation of a Low-Cost AIS Transmitter using the SDR technology and open-source software.