Men working on Alaska Marine Exchange communications tower at Eldred Rock Lighthouse, from left: Nick Hatch, Bryan Hinderberger, and Rob Mayer. Courtesy of Alaska Marine Exchange
fication Systems, or AIS, technologies to accomplish that goal, founder Paul Fuhs says. The system has been online since 2005. “The accuracy of those receivers can be plus or minus three meters,” Fuhs says. “We know within ten feet where a vessel is. We can tell which end of the boat the transponder is on. And we receive a position update every six seconds.” All that data is housed on a large server in Juneau, with backups in the Lower 48. The immediate data is used by the Coast Guard to assist with search and rescue operations. 24
“It changes the way you do business,” says Paul Webb, manager of the 17th Coast Guard District’s Operations Center.
Created on the Back of a Napkin
Fuhs, who was mayor of Dutch Harbor at the time, and Coast Guard Captain Ed Page created the Exchange on the back of a napkin over dinner, after discussing lives lost at sea and how to make Alaska waters safer for mariners. The pair patterned the Exchange on similar vessel tracking exchanges in the Lower 48. International vessels were al-
ready equipped with transponders sending out longitude and latitude. But, at the time, those signals were not being picked up in Alaska waters. “They were all transmitting, but there was nothing here to receive them by,” Fuhs says. In the Lower 48, the vessel tracking systems were mostly built and maintained by the Coast Guard, Webb says. Fuhs says the Exchange used money given to the state as a result of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill settlement to build the backbone of the system. The crew installed a few receiver sites
Alaska Business Monthly | July 2016 www.akbizmag.com