Saturday, April 1, 2023

StarLink Install

It looks like it should be easier than a satellite TV dish.  It is not pointed somewhere particular.   Have any of you done it?

Hysterical comment that deserves posting.
I have Starlink. Installed over a year ago. If the installation process has changed at all, I suspect it's gotten easier. The concept clearly intends an astronaut on the surface of Mars wearing a bulky pressure suit, manipulating heavy gloves, seeing through a cracked faceplate to complete the process in under one minute.

2 comments:

  1. I have Starlink. Installed over a year ago. If the installation process has changed at all, I suspect it's gotten easier. The concept clearly intends an astronaut on the surface of Mars wearing a bulky pressure suit, manipulating heavy gloves, seeing through a cracked faceplate to complete the process in under one minute. In my case, we opened the box, uncoiled the cable, slid the "dish" (2nd generation, now a rectangle) onto a "foot", and carried the dish and far end of cable as far into the backyard as possible to get away from the house while still snaking the near end of cable through the doggy door onto the sunporch. Set dish on lawn. Plug data cable (heavy but standard Power-over-Ethernet PPoE) into router -- cool looking box, but nothing too different from any other router you might see from Netgear or Belkin-- the sockets for the data cable have differently shaped large slots to make it impossible to plug the data cable into the power port, for instance. Uncoil the power cord and plug it into the only OTHER socket in the router. Shove the other standard 110V plug into a US standard 110V electrical wall socket. Wait. The dish moves tilts and wiggles around to find one of a zillion satellites. Locks on. (Dish turns and tunes to a new satellite every half hour or so) You're on. There are default SSID and password settings which one can and should change from within the Starlink Android phone app. It's possible and advisable to put up a pole or mast replacing the "foot" so that the dish is higher than the roofline of the house and can see more sky. We salvaged old DISH Network TV mast-mounting hardware and replaced the bigger round DISH dish with the rectangular Starlink "dish" after a few days, with a hired tech to be sure the mast was securely attached. (This let us run data cable along an attic vent and locate the router (built in WiFi) more centrally in the attic to keep consistent WiFi signal all over the house. ) After a few months we purchased from Starlink an adapter that extends the data cable a little and adds on more Ethernet port to the only one built-in to the router. That lets us connect to another standard Netgear Mesh Router, serving two extenders, and configured as an "Access Point". The entire 2-something acre property can access the internet over WiFi through the NetgearAP to the Starlink. There are typically about 20 WiFi devices -- security cameras, printers, phones, TVs, PCs, "smart speaker" -- maintaining a connection most of the time. Only three or four of those are heavy traffic, most of the time. We also had and continue to use an Uninterruptable Power Supply in the attic -- when the damnable Texas windmill power grid flickers the Starlink and Netgear Mesh stay stable. (Outdoor cameras and phones have their own batteries. The main desktop PC? Not so much.)

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    1. Easily the funniest response EVER. I am promoting at least first sentence into the post.

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