MONICAP™ originated from a pilot project launched in 1988, whose results have revolutionised worldwide the fishing surveillance techniques. MONICAP is a monitoring system for the fishing activity inspection that uses Global Positioning System (GPS) for the vessel location and Inmarsat-C technology for the satellite communications between ships and a terrestrial control centre. MONICAP has been successfully introduced in the market and is currently installed or being installed in about 800 fishing ships operating under control of Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland and Angola. For each of these countries, several Control Centres, which visualise the ships on the geographical map and monitor all their movements and activities, have also been developed and supplied.

The MONICAP system has "black box" design that allows the land-based monitoring of the position and speed of ships in which a special MONICAP box is installed.

The MONICAP box uses a satellite positioning system together with communications technology for continuous and automatic transmission of the position, course and speed of the ship to the Control Centre. Using computer and information technologies, this Control Centre provides the real time surveillance of the fleet activity.

Besides making the system more reliable and providing the world level coverage, the satellite based communications, also allows message exchanging between the ships and any reception point as well as provides land-ship fax communications regardless of the vessel position.

The communication capacity provided by the system goes beyond the basic monitoring task, including, for example:

The potential final users of the MONICAP system are responsible entities for the monitoring and inspection of the fishing activities such an as the Navy, Coastal Guard, port authorities, marinas, ship owners and research institutes.