Neal Arundale

Neal Arundale is an independent developer whose open-source focus centers on maritime data interpretation, best known for the single-title catalog hosted at https://github.com/arundaleais. The publisher’s signature utility, Ais Decoder, transforms raw Automatic Identification System radio traffic into human-readable CSV, KML, JSON, and database formats that chart-plotters, GIS suites, Excel, and Python notebooks can ingest directly. Originally created for hobbyists monitoring coastal VHF with cheap SDR dongles, the lightweight Windows console program has found steady uptake among port authorities, academic researchers, yacht clubs, and environmental agencies that need to audit shipping lanes, log vessel tracks, or feed live positions to local web maps. Typical workflows involve piping discriminator audio from a scanner into the decoder, watching real-time ship positions populate in OpenCPN or Google Earth, and exporting filtered logs for collision-risk analysis, emission studies, or race replay. Because the tool adheres to the NMEA-AIS specification and exposes every message type from static voyage data to safety-related broadcasts, it also serves as a validation reference for larger commercial systems. Updates appear whenever new AIS sentence types are ratified, ensuring continued compatibility with evolving transponder firmware. Neal Arundale’s software is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always install the latest upstream build, and can be queued for batch deployment alongside other applications.