Remote AIS receiver/repeater

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I live close to the sea, and my kids love seeing the comings and goings of boats into town on their way to school. I have an AIS receiver in the loft that feeds data to our local network and to the chart software on my laptop. I'm then primed each morning to answer the kid's questions of "What's that boat Daddy? Where is it going? Where is it from?".

When the search-and-rescue helicopters fly overhead to refuel at the local airfield, I get a ping from Twitter to tell me to point it out

I have AIS envy though. We are *just* in range of the larger ships entering town, but smaller fishing vessels are just out of range, hidden behind some big lumps of granite. The Scottish geography is not my friend here; across the bay just over 5 miles away is a receiver on top of a big hill - that receiver sees EVERYTHING, and I am jealous.

Here enters the gadget tinkerer, throwing his latest acquired technology toolkit towards the problem. I'm tinkering with a wireless race tracker project at the moment, which involves LoRa data links, GPS position reporting and low power/battery power design, so it's just one small step up to building a solar powered AIS receiver to plonk on a local hilltop and use the LoRa radio link to backhaul the AIS messages to my house.

There's a few parts to this project:
* AIS reception
* LoRa backhaul
* solar power management
* LoRa basestation and AIS WAN uplink

I'll cover each section in a separate post