In this paper, an accurate frequency offset estimator is investigated in the intermediate frequency for the satellite-based automatic identification system (AIS) signals. Using Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) modulation for trans-mission, the AIS signal is shown to be a plane wave with the modulated phase information and carrier frequency re-sulting from the Doppler effects. Hence, the phase information can be eliminated with a re-modulated signal, and the frequency offset can be estimated by the ratio of the maximum spectral amplitude and its neighbor spectral amplitude based on the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) interpolation. The estimator has low complexity, and it is easy to im-plement. Computer simulations are used to assess the performance of the estimator.