All things STARLINK

I was talking to a gen 3 dishy owner in a camp spot the other day and he was using a Victron Orion-TR 12/48-8A (380w) to run Starlink. The Victron is adjustable up to just under 60v and the Starlink can run on about 55v and up to it's required 57v. The Victron typically costs more than the Gen3 dishy but it makes for an elegant soluion to running it on 12v.
The Gen 2 like mine runs on 48v so the Victron could be used to run a gen 2 too but the Yaosheng 3 in 1 from Aliexpress is cheaper and does the same job plus has the correct connections for the Gen 2 dishy cable.

so, the mini is on sale for a couple of weeks down here which got me to do some research and... I actually think it is a life saver for us!

My original concerns still stand but time has proven that starlink is not necessarily out to get us (international) overlanders so the workarounds to keep the service going seem to be still valid with no signs of going away. On to the positive stuff :)

The mini is significantly smaller and lighter. If I calculated correctly my gen2 setup is about 14kg and the mini (just the dish) is a tad over 1kg. That is a huge difference! The unit also has a simple barrel plug for power (5.5mm 2.1 for the pin) and can be powered from 12 to 48 volts. This means no USB-C, no wall plug no nothing just hook it up to your batteries! No more buck/boost/inverter losses! Sure, you need to make sure you have a decent wire gauge and this might only work on lithium since they don't really drop below 12v ever but that'll do for me.

The mini also still has an ethernet port so you can use it with your own router if you so desire (I do) yet it is still so portable that you can just use it's builtin wifi and toss it outside when parked underneath trees.

The only (valid) argument I have found that might cause people to consider the gen3 in stead is: speed. The larger dish will perform better in adverse conditions simply due to a larger antenna array and it also seems the larger array is capable of pushing through more data at the cost of higher power consumption. So for those of us who do youtube or whatever and need to send/receive large files around, you can push a lot more data at only a small increase of power usage which means that you would actually use less power to send/receive the same amount of data but I think that is a corner case for most people. (refence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80eheLG8Stk )

Also, the mini does NOT work with POE (power over ethernet) so you would need 2 long cables if you want to use the unit outside with the ethernet port, although I think that POE also exists as separate units, ie works like a bias-t the same way it does for say antenna's etc. This way you can insert POE at one end and strip it off at the other. I do think 12v operation might suffer due to the small wire gauge and losses but that is something I still have to look into.

I am about to pull the trigger on this beauty but I was wondering if there are more comparison experiences here between any gen dishy and the mini? Not so much interested in speed as I am in performance during cloud, rain, trees, etc coverage.

Cheers!
-P

I occasionally look at the Australian Starlink users group on farcebook and they seem to get reasonable speeds on the mini, plenty of them mount it inside on the dash or in a sunroof or caravan hatch and it still seems to work ok.
A gen 3 should get higher speeds due to being bigger especially in marginal conditions.
On that note I've not noticed any differences between my Gen2 and my sisters Gen 3 when we've been camped up side by side. She has to fiddle around with hers sometimes aligning it in the correct direction in the app but other than that the gen3 is more compact to pack as there isn't a post sticking out the back of it.
The mini being much smaller would lend itself to permanent mounting externally better but the ability to put it on a Ram mount or similar and have it looking out the windscreen would be good, wouldn't work well on things like Defenders and Oka's with flat nearly vertical screens though.
Less bits to go wrong as it runs on 12v direct is a big thing, just don't use a fag socket and expect a reliable connection.

Starlink has just releasede at DcDc power supply for Gen 3.... I have one coming...

This is interesting. Hope something similar comes here. Early days.

https://youtu.be/Z4MeVbIkRR4'si=IE1cSqzFYnpZ8EvH

In the end I got the mini and not a moment too soon since we are currently bunking in a so called "tiny house" for the time being. Since there is not internet service here other than my dataplan on my cellphone and it is not particularly fast I decided to give the mini a testrun before we ship it with the car.

I must say, I am both surprised and disappointed at the same time in the little bugger but overal I think it will serve us well the coming years during our travels.

First of all the placement. We are situated in the woods and it is winter over here fortunately so no leaves apart from some evergreen bushes but they are below the 110 degree angle of the dish anyway. There is only one spot where I can place the dish where it has decent clear skies which in in front of the house, looking over the roof. Still, as you can see in the attached image there is still a lot of obstructions but this is as good as I can get it:

Attachment 192353

With this setup, under clear skies I get around 1 outage per 15 minutes on average, depending on the satellites I am connected to. Sometimes I can go 30 minutes without too much of a drop and then I get two very close to each other. For most internet use this is perfectly serviceable. Even VOIP calls (did not try video) it is workable since a drop of less than one second is usually nothing more than a glitch and only the 2 second + dropouts are very noticeable. With the other end aware of the problem you "only" need to repeat a bit of the conversation. Streaming video works just fine even on high quality settings and browsing works pretty much as you would expect. I have a VPN client on my systems which tells me when it is reconnecting so I have a sort of heartbeat monitor that tells me when the internet is down and that certainly helps with clicking a link more than once because something is not happening.

I also tried gaming and even though the latency is perfectly acceptable, the shorter dropouts are usually dealt with by the client but the longer dropouts cause serious problems even dropping you from the game. Not the main purpose of the starlink dish but it is nice to know that it can work.

However (there is always a "but" isn't there?) In anything but perfect conditions things get progressively worse. Cloud coverage is dealt with fairly well and hardly increases the dropouts and also does not impact speed noticeably but anything more than that has a severe impact on performance. We have a wood stove in the house and when firing it up, the early cold stove produces a stack of smoke of course and when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction over the dish I can see a drop in speed. Not so much an increase in dropouts. When there is fog the speeds generally decrease even more and dropouts do tend to rise. With heavy rain the dropouts increase substantially and the duration is also much longer in general.

The last few days it has even been snowing, which is nice :) but that really started to impact the mini. It turned it snow melt ability on, as it should, but the large flakes floating through the air seriously hindered the reception/transmission. My ping uptime went down to something like 75% dropouts were very regular and watching a 1080p30 youtube video was barely possible since I ran out of buffer on a few occasions. The speed seems to be ok since when there is reception for a longer spell it will recover the playback buffer.

Talking about speeds: The one thing that is a dissapointment on the unit is it's builtin wifi router. It is a great solution and one of the reasons I got the little dishy in the first place, smaller, lighter and much more ergonomic for our overland travels but it turns out that the wifi signal itself is pretty low. The dish is at most 4m away from my window (in a wooden building so not much steel or concrete if any) and about 1m below (since the house sits higher) and both my laptop as well as my desktop show me a 1 bar reduced signal strength. In general when performing a speed test on my iphone with the app I could see the speeds from starlink to the internet to be above 100mbit whilst both my laptop and desktop would struggle to reach 20mbit, mostly running at around 10mbit. The speed from starlink to my iphone was usually a lot better but then again, it is a phone which I hold in my hand standing in front of the window so it has a much better LOS I suppose.

In order to determine if the dish itself performs better than I could experience through wifi I have plugged in a 20m long ethernet cable directly into my desktop. Where at first I could just about watch 1080p60 content I can now easily watch 1440p content without issue and my speeds are up to 150mbit on a good day.

So, to sum this all up, what does this mean? Well, I think that the mini will work quite nicely in open areas for just about any purpose. It will also work in motion as I understand it (but have not tested that) We intend to mount the dish on top of the roof, inside the spare tyre which would give a perfectly nice view of the sky. Since the wifi router at that point is about 1m tops away from our devices and only has to go through 30mm of sandwich paneling it should give me full performance at any time. But this is where it gets interesting; like with solar panels on top of the roof vs a solar blanket you want to park the car in the shade but have all the sun :) The same goes for starlink; placing it on the roof and parking underneath trees it simply won't work I reckon. Bringing a longer powercable or even a battery mod so you can use your powertool batttery for a couple of hours to place it say 30m away from the vehicle will get you nice starlink to internet performance but I suspect pretty bad wifi performance, judging by my experiences thus far.

I have also been looking into the power situation. I was at first considering powering the device directly from 12 volts but it seems there are reports floating around that the dish gets real hot when using low voltage. Not sure why that is. The second issue is voltage drop. We will be running lithium batteries, against my better judgement, so we should pretty much always have over 12v available but voltage drop over the cable does become a thing. On average the mini reports that is uses 18watts. that is pretty much bang on 1.5Amps at 12 volts. In order to reduce the voltage drop due to wire resistance I would need to run a decent diameter cable, which is perfectly doable when the dish sits on its perch on the roof but not when 30m away from the car. (and not battery powered)

The second observation is that the mini does not support PoE, which makes sense I guess since it was not designed the way the other dishes were. I would however be very useful in our case since we could then simply have a single cable running from the car to the dish and place it in an unobstructed location. I have looked into passive PoE and delock seems to sell a unit which has the exact correct barrel plug specifications for the mini. It works by disabling the gigabit wires and only use the 4 100mbit wires leaving the other 4 available for power but that is acceptable as far as I am concerned. The thing is though that the generally very small diameter of ethernet cable wires (mostly 0,5mm2 per wire) would cause too much power drop over the cable to connect it directly to 12volts and a stepup converter would be needed.

Not sure yet what I'll do.

Cheers,
-P

I note that SL is now offering 50GB of "backup" in the US. Not sure just what that means, but their track record suggests the feature will likely roll out elsewhere reasonably soon. 50 ain't all that much, I guess, but could be bloody useful when travelling if you have no other cloud services.
Hmm, haven't looked at how cloud stuff gets billed on SL.

They finally sucked me in with their $299 sale for the Starlink Mini hardware.

The unit arrived the other day and it seems to work well. I get better speeds than the telstra 5G wifi hotspot I've been using.

I put it all into an old Trimcast case I've had laying around here at home with a view to making a portable kit which we can throw into any of the cars for remote area interwebs while travelling.

The trimcast case can be secured to the cam net rack of either the Perentie FFR or RFSV or the roof rack of my Mrs JKU Jeep as a low-profile enclosure for the dish, since these will operate through the lid.

Inside the case will be a pair of Kings 12Ah lithium powerpacks wired in parallel for a total of 24Ah. This should last around 10hrs continuous use. While travelling the dish can run off the vehicles' house battery while also recharging the Kings powerpack/s.

For basecamp use, I have a pair of 200W solar blankets I carry in the storage bins in the RFSV as well as a separate 135Ah battery box.

Still waiting some different cables to arrive, including a waterproof ethernet adapter which allows the Starlink terminal to be used with a direct wired connection to the computer rather than over wifi - this should save some battery life and reduce the EM footprint of the unit.

So far I've only done backyard testing, but as I get more experience with the unit I'll relate my experiences here.


Attachment 192565Attachment 192566.

Having had to rely on starlink for the past 6 months on 3 different locations/situations now I thought I'd share my experiences (again).

Most if not all of the comments I made in my previous post are still valid and we have since moved to a different location into a wooden chalet. Tall trees line the property which have since grown full of leaves since it is summer down here. Since my previous experiences told me that obstructions are really the main problem with satellite communication I was a bit stubborn (or experimental, you choose) and aimed the mini, which does not self align, at the only spot where the dish would have the most available clear skies.

Well, that did not work out as planned. The chalet has a partial flat roof on top of the extension which made for the perfect spot to place the dish. I positioned it so that it would be as close to the edge of the roof as it could get without hurting its field of view. Turns out, of course, I still get a lot of obstructions but it was the best I could do. As the spring progressed into the summer more foliage started to appear and the performance of the dish really started hurting. No longer could one watch a decent youtube video without running out of buffer and anything that required real time internet was a struggle. The most I could get would be 15 minutes, if that, if internet at one go and more often than not I would have serious dropouts every few minutes. My ping success would be as low as 70% and things became unworkable.

Last week we went to the abenteuer und allrad messe and I broke out my gen 2 dish from storage. I decided to bring the mini and see if I could compare the mini with the 2 at some point. As that goes on short holidays with a planning, never enough time for the things you think you can pick up on the side [bighmmm] In any case, we were situated in a river valley that blocked quite a lot of view of the sky but we did run the mini for a couple of hours. I thought it a good test to see what starlink would be like when camping up for the night and just get some internet work done or watch a video. It took the poor thing 15 minutes to figure out it was 600k's further east than before but it did work in the end, albeit with massive interruptions as was to be expected. I did watch a youtube live stream and the biggest advantage here is that a live stream will simply stop to buffer on your local device. ie. at some point the buffer was large enough to never really have another interruption so that was great! I doubt though that watching another service would be possible.

Speaking of which, in both my previous setups I was unable to properly watch amazon prime (we got it for free, should not matter in service right?). Their app would not handle the prolonged dropouts resulting in tcp/ip timeouts gracefully and it would drop me to the main screen again. I had to restart playback, it would sortof remember where we were and get on with it. Now, amazon does provide the option to download content to watch later which is in the end what I did but dang. Having to click on clarksons farm S4E1 and then wait a long time for the rather slow and buggy internet to pull it in is a pain. Also, this process is also not graceful in failing you have to manually restart the download if it fails.

As usual, I digress, this is about starlink not amazon :D

Back to the dishies; when I got back home I decided to skip internet for a night and tether my phone if need be and placed the gen 2 (without a subscription activated) on the exact opposite corner of the roof and allowed for its auto alignment to do the trick. The dish will work and generate obstruction data etc. even without an active subscription. I let it run for some 24hours to see what it did. The dish pointed itself, by chance, in the only slightly less dense foliage area of the trees and started collecting data. After stabilizing the ping time was well over 99% which was a surprise, so, I pulled the gen2 off and on went the mini, manually aligning it as per the app which ended up in roughly the same direction of course. To my surprise the ping uptime after another 24 hours was also up into the 99%

My conclusion so far: unless you are actually looking into a wall, mountain or a dense forrest it is probably better to not stubbornly choose a clear sky for the mini (and probably the same goes for the gen3 or a modified gen 2). It seems that

• tracking satellites that are not moving in the direction the software is optimized for will just not work as well
• there are not enough satellites in the constellation to provide coverage side to side as opposed to top to bottom
• a bit of both?

I have since put the gen2 back on the roof since the mini's wifi, as previously reported, is really poor and so is the wifi on my mac pro. The fairly short distance through a wooden house was already too much and I would not get any more than 10mbit or so whilst my phone went like a rocket.

Hope this helps someone :)

Cheers,
-P

Right, daughter and hubby are doing the big circle with 2 pre teen daughters who have ipads, especially for those longer journeys with not a lot to see.
If they install a satellite communication system, either in the van, (or probably more flexible in the car?), does it operate successfully while traveling as well as when camped?