gemini://thatit.be/2024-02-24-06-18-50.gmi

I rely on cellular internet where I live. Lately, the throughput has been worse than usual. Especially for this time of year! Normally I have a pretty consistent two bars of signal and am able to stream video and even hold voice calls, but lately it has been extremely high latency. When browsing Gemini got to be too much of a struggle I decided to give Starlink a try. Cellular and satellite are the only options where I live. I should note, I can’t actually rely on a cell phone where I live, I have to use VoIP because the reception is so poor that only the stationary base station is able to get a consistent signal, regular devices fall off and lose signal all the time.

In under a week the kit arrived. I didn’t really do any research, I just ordered it and when it arrived I didn’t know what direction to point it. The “instructions” are a single sheet of paper with a QR code and some very simple pictures. I plugged everything in, went outside and put the dish on the ground. After a few minutes I saw the new SSID pop up, so I joined it.

There was no service, I didn’t know what way to point the dish, and I didn’t know what the administrative URL was. I did some searching and found some reviews saying it would establish service when you set it, that it had to point roughly north, and that you had to have a cell phone with a recent version of Android or iOS to do the setup, but you could also connect to https://dishy.starlink.com

A few moments later I had it pointing north, pulled up the URL, and could see that it was establishing a connection. It was experience frequent “obstructions” and losing service, but despite that I was getting between 100-230 Mbps down and between 8 and 35 Mbps up. That’s an order of magnitude faster than what I usually get. While the service interruptions are noticeable in lengthy voice calls and screen shares, I am able to play multiplayer games on the Nintendo Switch (Minecraft on Realms, and complete missions in Warframe) seemingly without issue.

I could not change any settings without their smart phone app. The network was insecure, but at least it was up and running. It was also a lot faster than what I was used to. The interruptions would last for 2-3 seconds, but the service was still considerably faster than what I was used to. I was able to watch video without noticing any buffering because so much of it would download before any interruptions would happen that if not for checking the status page, I wouldn’t have known there were interruptions.

The next day I got out my OnePlus 6, which runs Lineage OS, but couldn’t be used on my provider’s network, so I ended up replacing it with a PinePhone a few years back, and I found a shady website providing APKs that had the Starlink app and I installed it. I was able to see my dish was misaligned by 11 degrees and needed a few hours to finish determining the extent of the obstructions (for a total of 12 hours, I suppose).

I was able to set a password, change the SSID, and configure when I wanted the system to simply go to sleep and conserve power (which turned out to be a pretty small window given the time that I will wake up on certain days vs going to sleep on other days because I have those Chinese tutoring sessions.)

I have since tried moving it around my yard, which is the largest clearing on my entire property, but the obstruction issues remain. It’s been only four days, and I have a few more weeks to try it before I have to decide if I’m going to keep it and it’s a tough choice.

It seems a bit extreme to go cut down trees just to get a clearer view of the sky, and the area that is clear seems like it would be large enough, given that there’s only a tiny bit of red around the edges where the app says the view is obstructed. While the field of view does contain only a tiny bit of red around the edges, I don’t know that removing those trees would be enough or even if the connection stability would improve if I did that. And the price of service is twice what I’m paying for cellular internet right now.

So I’ll toy with it for a few weeks, consider getting some sort of mounting kit to give it a little more elevation, and generally see how it goes. Right now it’s more reliable than my cellular service, but it’s also expensive.

Starlink

motivation

setup

results

more setup

conclusion

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