Totally agree, I put some text and tried to make it clear. My first intention was to find some live ship tracking API and see how many ships cross the strait, but they were all hundreds of dollars a month, and behind enterprise contact forms.

You need to send an analyst there with binoculars, a box of cigars and $15k in cash to get realtime trustworthy data

The strait is wider than horizon distance from reasonable heights. Also that's how you don't hear back from the analyst in many different ways.

Do these ships not use transponders? E.g., in the US you can use a SDR dongle and a RPI to read local updates. The straight isn't very wide.

Seems cheaper than the cigars and cash.

Transponders get turned off all the time, especially if you don't want to be targeted.

Are they though, in the straight ? I'm not sure it's such a great move, TBH:

Given that the baddies clearly can locate ships and see that there's no transponder, and come to the conclusion they need. "Hmm, it turned off transponders and is now moving toward the straight. It's a tanker, and not one of ours, or Russia's or China's. Let's bomb it!"

Also, pragmatically, you could look at the transponders suddenly not showing up anymore as a sign of attempt of passage, especially if they show up later on the other side.

But yes, that would no longer be very realtime.

The fleet serving Iran and Russia does not use transponders. It's a large fleet. Ships without transponders are just a fact of life in shipping.

Sure, but for the purpose of this discussion, those ships don't matter. What matters is what the ships NOT belonging to Iran's friends do.

Technically all ships crossing the strait matter as their cargos end up being bought, sanctioned or not, Iran-friendly or not; they wouldn't have crossed otherwise. If we're talking about avoiding a global recession and worst case famine in some parts of the world, the oil and gas must start moving regardless of who is the shipowner.

Transponders are a voluntary system, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet

or just a cubesat on a polar orbit with a Nikon Z9 inside

I've done some small scale ship tracking in the past, and yeah, anything beyond finding a specific ship while it is near the shore is stupid expensive.

What do you think of adding prediction market data to the indication? So basically there's this:

https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...

My approach would be if that jumps up to 75%+ it would change to YES. And if we get into May they have one for then too:

https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...

You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.

Edit: I added this, I can see a few downvotes, happy to discuss here or in the github repo if anyone has strong feelings on it!

i didnt downvote you but why wouldn't i just go to Polymarket directly for this

I mean you obviously could, the url is a little harder to remember and it doesn't have crossing data. This was just a small fun project I did, so you're free to do whatever you like. The reason I thought of using polymarket data is I didn't have live ship tracking data which is what I originally intended to use.

I don't mean to say your project is not good, quite the opposite. You successfully got the real vessel crossing data and the prediction data is sort of derived or not really based on reality but on the crowd.