Once you have received your patch antenna, put it on the balcony or window ledge and aim at the sat(s) that are available at your location : here in France i have 2 options, the 25 East (above Congo) and the 54 West (above Amazonia); of course the 25E is higher on the horizon compared to the one above Brazil, but I receive both perfectly as there is no wall, line of trees, or anything that could be an obstacle.

Connect your antenna to your receiver (in my case an Air Spy Mini) and then link that receiver to your PC. Switch on your favourite tuning platform (SDR Console 3 in my case), and tune to one busy channel, like Telnor (Eik, Norway) that operates in USB on 1539.45 Mhz approx (it varies a bit with time but by a tiny margin; the temperature of your system matters too).

Make sure the Bias T is "on" (ticked)  to amplify the signal that has covered a huge distance from the geo stationary bird. You should see neat rays of data and a loud noise. If not, something is wrong in your setup.

Now on the ScytaleC software that you have just ignited, make sure "transmit" is ticked to allow Scytale to send raw data to the Scytale Quick UI software which will do the final decoding in clear text . Don't panic if you get one message received every 15 sec but none of them decodes after a half hour, because less than 5% of messages are in clear; but that still means a lot of text messages to peruse if you let the damn thing run alone for several hours  (after the gear's warming up, the system gets pretty stable and you can go shopping or on a hike)

You must adjust the frequency on SDR Console 3 by a few tens or hundreds  of Hz until the green circle below appears even partially or totally if you can (it's made of little green bubbles and it must stay alive, it's a quality tuning indicator)

You have now opened Quick UI and after a long series of messages that triggered nothing, you get a message from a shipping company in Latinized Russian ! They wrote this message in Latvia (i see that from their website) , then they had it sent up to the sat by the Telnor big dish in Norway and what you received is the sat's downlink to the boat. The cargo might be thousands of miles from any VHF covered area, she will get the message as each Inmarsat sat has an Earth print roughly equivalent to a third of the Globe; that's what is was designed for.

And then you catch your first ship message (in fact the downlink from the sat to Ground control) and if you are lucky (you will not always be !! ) the name of the ship is obvious (here the Thor Omega). Here you are extra lucky as she gives her position !!

Each ship is identified in the 1st line of message by a part of her name (here OMEG for Thor Omega); some ships make it even clearer for you and replace that 'truncated name' by their callsign. The digit starting with 4 is an indicator of the country of MMSI registration ; WARNING> only trust the 2nd, 3rd and 4th digit, drop the initial 4, the rest is crap) ; here 231 is the true national prefix of the country that registered the Thor Omega, so Faroe Islands.

A message from the Ferrol Knutsen (devilishly shortened in FEKN ); you are lucky again as the full name is in the text body !

As a rule all messages with a PTS with value "1" are empty or lines of tests (like 0123456789 abcdef...)

Here the country is France (MMSI 228)

As far as i know the system does not store the messages, so you better "copy and paste to a Word file" anything you wish to keep for the record. Otherwise it will be lost at the software closure.

The SPAR PAVO has been kind enough to sign their message with the ship's name in clear; the country is 258 so Norway, and they even gave out their almost full callsign, in fact LATR7. What more do you want ? Now be serious, do not publish logs that show private telephone numbers, private e-mails or personal messages , the kind of which you'll come across with fishing boats or offshore platform personnel with a lonely heart. You would be severely handled by magistrates and your gear confiscated. NEVER DO IT