Marine Insturments is a Spanish company founded in 2003 dedicated to the design and manufacturing of GPS Radiobuoys.
These radio buoys allow the longline vessels to follow the path of the line and detect when this breaks. When the vessel receives the real-time data about the position of each radio buoy, it may access the exact position of such radio buoys, which causes a considerable saving in time and fuel in comparison to the radio buoys which work with radio direction finders, which only indicate the direction of the radio buoys. This old system is pretty inaccurate and makes the ship navigate longer distances to find each of the radio buoys than with the GPS system.
This new system allows using any of the receivers that are already installed in the ship, which are connected to the Marine Instruments decoder and to a computer.
It is also possible to place a receiver from Marine Instruments that makes the system work independently from the equipment in the vessel.
The software used presents the data of all radio buoys in the digital chart system, which enables users to see the graph of the complete line, the drift thereof, and possible breakings. It has a complete tools system to analyze acquired data and which allows exporting the position of the radio buoys to standard navigation programs.