How do you search for ships at sea?

Transcript

Okay, I am back, is Brian of London here in Tel Aviv. And I wanted to make a little video explaining how you find ships at sea, or the kind of vagaries of how you find ships when you're not talking about AIS and when you're not staring at marine traffic. Because what I have in front of me here today is a sea. Probably going to have to flip the camera around and edit this together. But I'll put in some big video of the sea that's in front of me. There we go, that's sea. And right now where I'm standing, as you can see in the background there, I'm about 40 meters up from the surface of the sea. That's the GPS altitude. It looks about right to me. And also, when I'm here, Just behind me is this thing. Now, I actually don't know exactly whose that is and who runs it, but I know exactly what it is. It's a pretty standard, largeish marine radar system. Now, it could be being used for weather, because that's perfectly capable of tracking storms and clouds. and all sorts of weather conditions. Aeroplanes have got one of those in the front of the cone of the nose, so they look forward, they can see thunderstorms ahead of them. It could be used for tracking ships too. I don't actually, I don't know. I suspect it's not sort of highly military because it would be covered in a dome and less obvious. It's not, it is. Nobody's taken any steps to... to hide it. In fact, when I watch people walk past on this path, they all look up at it and wonder what it is. But I know, it's a marine radar. Now, we're at 40 metres. If you go do the mass, and I just did with Grog, you can see, if you're looking for ships, my view here extends to the horizon about 22 to 23. statute miles. I did the maths with regular miles for Americans, not nautical miles, and that is basically the width of the Hormuz Straits, give or take a mile or two here or there. So, standing on one side in a clear day, you can look at, oh, and that's when you're looking for something that's 20 metres tall, so a ship, a large ship, a container ship or a tanker. from a platform as high as this, which is 40 metres above the sea level, which is just basically a small hill. Tel Aviv does not have much undulation, but this is a little hill on the coast. And I can probably see at least 20 miles. In fact, it's not very hazy today. I can see a ton of little sailing ships. The sailing ships don't show up very well on radar. And because of that, most sailing ships have a big metal thing, basically an aluminium ball at the top of, at the highest point of their ship, to reflect more radar. Because when you're a sailing ship, you actually want to be seen on radar. The other thing that helps find ships today is this thing called AIS. AIS is a radio that you have on your ship that broadcasts all the time that says, there's my name of my ship, and this is the GPS location where I am right now. But it's your radio, and you can do with it what you want. There's no requirement for small ships to have AIS, but most leisure yachts choose to broadcast their AIS position because it's a safety feature. Ships in the vicinity can pick up your AIS signal by radio, but also there are satellites that are flying around, and this is what feeds marine traffic in the law of the cases. There are satellites which are also listening to these faint radio signals, which are totally unencrypted, and the radio signal says, this is the name of the ship, and this is where it is. And that's what goes on to marine traffic. Now, any ship... From the biggest to the smallest, and especially military ships, they can just turn off their AIS at any moment. They can program their AIS to say that they're 50 miles away. They can program their AIS to say that they're on the other side of the world. They can do all sorts of games with their AIS. It's totally and utterly unreliable. Military ships tend not to broadcast AIS. And unless some of their crew make stupid mistakes by having, like, you know, running trackers and running... loops around the deck of the French aircraft carrier, then you don't get any signal from them. But all this is to say, the next level up is if you've got your own satellites that are looking down, or you've got airplanes with radar, your horizon becomes enormous. Radar on an airplane, which is what the Americans have in droves, That's a whole other ballgame. That's all to do with how much energy you can put out as to how far you can see. Because your horizon, when you're 20, 30,000 feet up, your horizon is just huge. You can see half the world. All of this means that, and if you go look also at the line where the Americans have chosen to do their blockade, that line is not very big. blockades are the stock in trade of warfare. In reality, what won World War II and World War I was blockading Germany eventually. You know, you had to fight the war on the ground to get to Berlin, but the reason you could fight all the way through Europe was because you were blockading them. And that was the whole purpose of having a navy. There are two purposes of having a navy. One, to stop someone else blockading you. and two, to blockade the other guy. And the Americans, what Trump and the team that he's got has put together was the key, that was just, that was naval warfare to the max. It's like, number one, take away the other guy's navy, number two, blockade him. All in all, you know, I can't find any fault with how they're playing it. And all of these sort of... geniuses who stare at marine traffic and think they've noticed something slipped past the American blockade. Nothing is going to get past that blockade that the Americans don't want to. And the Americans also have the massive global advantage that they can wait all the way to the Straits of Malacca to take a ship. They can wait all the way across the Indian Ocean. They don't have to take it within sight of Iran. No, all in all, if the Americans have the will, to stop your country getting anything by sea, they absolutely have the equipment and the means necessary. Anyway, that's Brian of London, I'm at the top of this hill. I will try and drop in, maybe I'll try and play with that editor thing on TikTok. I'm not very good at it, but I thought I did enlighten you, and it's a beautiful day here. waiting for, well, you know, the water restart. Anyway, this has been Brian of London, out at the top of the hill, on the coast, with the sea next to me in Tel Aviv. Bye.

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