Eh, that doesn't really explain the part I'm curious about. There are two things I'm unclear on.
1) A ship is in the middle of the Atlantic with no other ships around it (within range of AIS?) - who sees it's AIS signal such that it can be shown on the Vesselfinder map?
2) If I see, on my AIS, a bunch of boats around me, and another boat sees me but wouldn't normally be able to see some of the boats that I see, does he see them by virtue of him seeing me? Does he see what I see? I could imagine it's kind of like a mesh network where each transmitter/receiver repeats what it sees. In that way, I could see an overall picture being built up and eventually getting to a land-based (or other upload-capable receiver) that could upload their entire picture to a central DB somewhere.
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