[encantotom]

starlink uses a soft cap in some other countries along with giving a reduced monthly price. starlink has been expanding too fast here in the usa in my opinion and many folks in areas that have cable or fibre are getting it. making it tougher on those of us that done have those options in rural areas.

the fup i hope will be well in excess of 1tb.

i already have a xeon server running unraid with plex on it.

i have two starlinks. the gen one round dishy here at home i have had for 18 months that has slowed down considerably and a gen 2 retangular dishy at our mountain home. it is great.

here at home when we moved here in 2014 the only choice was dsl and hughsnet. i had dsl for a couple of years but was at the far end of the demarc and co switch so i never got above 3mb. it was slower at times than that. i used to be on the state of arizona broadband commission and when i lived in town i only talked about rural internet issues. then i was living them. i knew the head of az centurylink through that commission and contacted him for help as regular channels got the brilliant suggestions of recycling the modem....ha

his network engineers confirmed that i was just too far away from the switch. as you know, dsl is a distance based service for data. and in its various versions (adsl, vdsl and its enhancements), about 18,000 feet is getting to be max. even though the switch was only about 2 miles by driving, it zig zaged around before it got to me and was older cabling. so no real hope of it being useful.

there are a number of small local point to point wireless providers that i used for a number of years. they were tons better than dsl, but not very reliable and speeds were all over the map.

starlink made everything great. it has been disappointing as starlink speeds have declined quite a bit since i started the beta. they definitely are throttling the upload speeds now in my opinion and that of many.

i will admit, i am a geek and have over 40 connections at a time on my network, most not consuming any bandwidth unless called upon.

i asked a fellow guru who has starlink rv what his speeds were. he gave the best answer. i dont know but i can do wifi calling and stream whatever my wife wants.......

here are a couple of interesting starlink sites to look at.

https://starlinkstatus.space/

https://satellitemap.space/?norad=45744

tom

[Richard]

I wanted to update the group on an experiment that I am running. Over the winter, I disassembled one of the flat face rectangular dishes, and built a flat mount using starboard and lexan for the cover. I permanently mounted this on the roof of the coach.

We are 4 stops into the summer journey, and I am happy to report two results. One, we have been able to VOIP and stream video with very little issues. We had a problem one evening when a huge storm rolled through but I think the ground mount would have had some issues then too.

The second result is that it works in motion. That was rumored on the interweb but untested by me. I am subscribed to the standard 150.00 mobile plan.

We are carrying a second dish with ground mount for those tree covered sites but so far so good on the flat roof mount.

No, I haven’t measured speeds between the two methods. It’s working for what I use it for.

[Jack Houpe]

I was going to ask you about this as I remember a photo with your starlink pointing straight up. Good information for those of us who don't want to buy another dish.

[folivier]

Richard, do you have a picture of your mount?
I'm interested in how flat it is or does it have an angle off of horizontal?
At my cabin with the tall trees it would have to point pretty straight up.

[Richard]

Ill get a pic soon. It is flat mounted to the roof. It points straight up. Before I disassembled ( ie destroyed) a dish, i ran some tests pointing the dish straight up. I saw about a 20% reduction in speeds but it worked fine for what we do

[folivier]

If it works pointing straight up then it would be easier to mount at my cabin. Keep me apprised on your trip if you would.
Safe travels!

[hypoxia]

At my cabin with the tall trees it would have to point pretty straight up.

I don't think it will solve your tree problem since it is still tracking satellites in the Northern sky.  The flat mount hack just keeps the motor from running..  The antenna is capable of tracking the northern sky when it is flat, just not as efficient, I believe.

[hbens]

Our Starlink using the ground mount lost internet this week when heavy storms came through here at Thousand Trails Carolina Landing. Prior to this we had not had issues when raining. I can't tell you if the usual heavy Florida afternoon storms would cause outages since we have cable internet at home.

[Richard]

I wanted to update the group on two months on the road with the flat mount dishie on the roof. We have been in 22 campgrounds so far. I have had to deploy the ground mount dishie three times in 22 campgrounds, the rest of the time the roof flat mount worked great.

It continues to provide internet while rolling. Rhonda has streamed tv several times, and made numerous phone calls.

It has been nice to have one less thing to setup and take down.

Looks like the Gen3 dish will be very easy to flat mount.

[hypoxia]

For my Gen 2 antenna, I just noticed the Starlink app now has a Tilt setting, Automatic or Flat.  Flat is "Best if your Starlink is often powered on while in motion.  To allow snow and rain to run off, Starlink may not be completely flat."  

I'll need to make a short mount to get the antenna at or below the side rails for in motion.