Starlink

[LittleBill21]

Do any of you have the dish still in the box, or on the ground and a pair of calipers?

are any of you using the HF collapsible flag pole with it?

20 Ft. Telescoping Flag Pole Kit

Amazing deals on this 20Ft Telescoping Flag Pole Kit at Harbor Freight. Quality tools & low prices.

www.harborfreight.com

if you do, please let me know. I am trying to make and adapter to fit both of them together and I don't own either.

Hi folks this is done. I am looking for a beta tester to see if my adapter works. If anyone is doing the HF flag pole combo with the starlink, let me know and I can ship this out for a very very cheap price to test it. you can see the price of the adapters on etsy.lmk if interested. This is a one time deal, only one or 2 people.you are expected to provide feedback and photo's, if you take up this offer. LMK.

 

[sodamo]

Good luck with that LittleBill. Seems like the telescoping flagpole could be a big hit with the RV crowd.

 

[sodamo]

try rebooting the usg after plugging in the SL

Nope, didn’t work

 

[LittleBill21]

Nope, didn’t work

should just be a dhcp pull from the starlink, can you check your wan settings on the usg? should be dhcp client?

 

[plowhog]

Does anyone know what problems an "obstructed" Starlink encounters?

Yesterday I moved my SL to a neighbor property as a test. His property is surrounded by a forest of tall pine trees. His house is in a "hole" in the midst of tall trees on all sides.

At my property, my SL antenna tilts toward the NE. So at his property, I set the antenna on top of his car-- in what would seem the most advantageous spot. It worked! Speed was a bit slower than what I am used to, but during a 1 hour test we didn't notice any dropouts.

Now he wants to "borrow" it for 12 hours to let SL accumulate obstruction data. I already know it's going to find *lots* of obstructions; however, I don't know how to gauge that. Do obstructions cause speed reductions? Dropout of service? Both? Will the SL app provide any data on this?

He is going to have to decide whether to pay $$ to sign up for SL that he knows will be obstructed. So I'm trying to help understand what the impact of those obstructions might be upon his use.

btw, his DSL service is soon to be terminated, and there are no other easy options in my area.

 

[K5lwq]

I have a lot of trees and yes there was plenty of obstruction when I first installed. It did cause short outages of 18 seconds or less. Speeds were slower and there were plenty of drops of 50% or more watching the uptime graft.

I recently extended my push pole as high as I could go and it definitely made things much better. I am now about 40’ high. I no longer get the obstructed message and the graft stays closer to 100%. Speed test have definitely improved as well.

 

[dmccarty]

I have no real way of knowing, but I suspect the obstructions will cause a drop out of the signal worst case or just a degradation but it is going to depend on how much obstruction he has at the house. We have a very slight obstruction on the west side of Dishy. I can see in the Starlink application that we have signal drops from time to time but I not sure how I could determine if the cause was the obstruction. In any case, the signal drops are not noticeable most of the time. We did have some sort of disruption they other day that we think was a Starlink issue but it went away within 10 minutes or so. I expect that as more satellites are launched the signal drops will go down if they are caused by the obstruction we have to the west.

Heavy rains have disrupted the signal as well.

Having said that, Starlink has been more reliable than DSL and the cell based Internet.

Later,
Dan

 

[ponytug]

Obstructions will cause dropouts, and therefore speed degradation; how long will depend on the size and thickness of the obstruction. Obviously, higher is better, and locating the antenna so that it "looks" across the open space to the northeast from the southwest corner is likely to do the best, unless his house has a high roof line.

The app works great at finding obstructions, and for choosing a site. Your neighbor can use the app without an account.

My two cents for your neighbor is to get Starlink, and if obstructions turn out to be an issue, to go for a ham radio type tower (e.g. Rohn). With people pulling down their broadcast TV antennas, you can often find an inexpensive one used via a local ham radio group or Craigslist. I have seen them free for the disassembly around here. If your neighbor is lucky, he has exposed bedrock and can bolt the antenna to rock.

All the best,

Peter

 

[plowhog]

My two cents for your neighbor is to get Starlink, and if obstructions turn out to be an issue, to go for a ham radio type tower (e.g. Rohn).

Probably in a week we'll do a 12 hour test re: the obstructions.

His roof ridge is probably 20', so getting on that is appealing. 12/12 pitch- so that adds some excitement around trying to get a SL antenna on that for a temporary test.

He has high voltage lines directly over where I set the SL antenna for yesterday's test. The roof ridge is nearby. A tower using the house for extra bracing at the ridge would seem opportune except it violates the safety / distance rule for a tower vs power lines. I'll check for another tower location that would work?

fyi I know SL at my property is partially obstructed by a large cedar tree. Surprisingly, even with obstruction, SL reports no problem with communication.

 

[LouNY]

When my SL was reporting minor obstructions I had many short drops of service and or degraded speed.
Of course mine has never been the great numbers you always hear about today it's 174 Mbps down and 27 Mbps up,
often it is 60-80 down and 10-18 up, which is still much better then any of my other options.
I relocated mine about 10 ft further North and have no obstructions now the app was very close to what I actually saw.