Live vessel positions, from real AIS
The map on an ocean shipment now shows where the vessel has actually been, not just where the route says it should be.
A solid violet track. Every position we confirm is recorded and joined into a line, with a dot at each fix. Hover a dot to see when the vessel was confirmed there. It is the only solid line on the map — the route itself is drawn dashed, because the route is the tracking service’s reconstruction rather than a record of where the ship went.
A marker that doesn’t bluff. The vessel marker stands on the newest position we could confirm as a genuine AIS fix. Estimated positions are left off the map entirely, so the ship never runs ahead of its own track to a spot nobody observed. Hover it for the real fix time. The marker is an arrow pointing along the route, so you can see which way the vessel is heading at a glance.
That distinction is the whole point. Most tracking products interpolate between AIS fixes and present the result as one confident dot, which glides along on schedule whether or not the vessel is moving. We would rather show you a position that is honestly a few hours old than one that is confidently wrong — see why tracking positions are often wrong for the longer version.
Positions refresh about once an hour, and each one carries the time the vessel was actually confirmed there — so what you see is honestly aged rather than pretending to be live.
Also fixed on the map while we were in there:
- Between two fixes that arrive a day apart, the track now follows the shape of the carrier’s route instead of cutting across headlands — or, at Panama, straight over the isthmus.
- A container crossing the Panama land bridge rides a train, and a train has no transponder. That leg is now drawn as an overland connector in its own colour, and the silence is explained rather than reported as a tracking outage.
- Ports and airports on the map are clickable — click one to zoom to it, click it again to zoom back out.
- Routes crossing the antimeridian, and mostly north–south routes, now frame correctly instead of rendering as a stripe across the world.
The observed track starts from the moment a shipment is first tracked. We don’t reconstruct positions from before then, so a shipment already at sea grows its trail over the following days rather than showing one straight away.
FAQ
Why does the vessel marker sometimes sit behind the dashed route?
Because the marker only stands on positions confirmed by a real AIS fix, and the dashed route is the tracking service’s reconstruction of the intended path. If the last confirmed fix is six hours old, the marker stays there rather than gliding forward to a position nobody observed.
What is AIS?
The Automatic Identification System — a transponder every commercial vessel broadcasts, picked up by shore stations and satellites. It reports the vessel’s position, not the container’s, which is why it stops being useful for your cargo after a transshipment.
Why is there a gap in the track at Panama?
Some containers cross the isthmus by rail rather than through the locks, and a train carries no AIS transponder. Trackberry draws that leg as an overland connector in its own colour instead of reporting the silence as a tracking failure.