From Newsgroup: rec.outdoors.rv-travel
sticks wrote:
I thought I had promised a report if I used it last week, but I can't
find that post, so I'll start a new one.
I did have cell service that was fair and would have worked, but I
figured I'd fire up the Starlink and see how it did.-a I didn't have a
great clear sky.-a Basically from the back of the trailer I had good pointing north, which is the most important, but everything behind
there was under the trees.-a Still, it told me I had obstructions, but
it shouldn't affect my usage very much.
Again I ran into the issue where I had smashed that stink bug in the
one Ethernet connection.-a At first I thought it was trees and not good enough coverage, but checking the logs kept saying it was
disconnecting from the router.-a I did tilt it a little out of what
they call proper alignment to give it more northern sky.-a Eventually,
I took it down from the pole and saw it was just a little gummed
looking on one or two of the connection copper contacts on the panel,
so I scraped them the best I could and put it back up.-a It immediately started working and I knew I had found the problem.-a I never did
change the tilt back and it didn't complain, so I don't know if it
would have done better if I changed that.
Speeds were not great, but since I only had 1/2 a clear sky I figured
it was OK considering.-a It did work much better than my cell service.
I did a speed test up there and it came in at about 30 Mbps.-a Much
lower than I've had before.
For reference, at home I just installed a new router.-a Before the swap
we were down to 50Mbps on our cable internet.-a The new router gets us
up to 575Mbps and is a dramatic improvement.-a So once home, I set up
the Starlink here in clear sky.-a 255Mbps download, and 32Mbps upload. Those upload speeds are faster than I get with cable for some reason.
Data usage.-a The $55 100 GB plan should be just fine for me.-a I used
it for three days and did a couple speed tests, and then when I got
home did several more as well as hooking up my garage desktop.-a I only
use a little under 5 GB and had 95 GB left.-a Plus, I thought they
would charge me $55, but they evidently pro-rate the usage and it only
ended up costing me $20.-a That surprised me.-a So now that I'm done for
the month, I'll go back and put it back into pause mode.
When you fire it up again, you might to experiment a little and see
how true this is:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Me: since there are so many sats up now, why does the starlink antenna
need to point north
AI: That's a good question. The short answer is: it's not because all
the satellites are north of you. It's because of how Starlink manages interference and coverage.
Here's why:
The satellites are constantly moving across the sky. A Starlink dish
("Dishy") doesn't lock onto one satellite. It tracks whichever
satellites are best at the moment and hands off from one to another automatically.
In the continental U.S., the dish is generally aimed north to avoid transmitting toward the crowded belt of Geostationary orbit over the
equator, which appears due south from your location. Many
communications satellites occupy that region. Pointing north helps
Starlink avoid causing interference with them.
The antenna isn't fixed to one direction. Although the dish may be
physically tilted north, its phased-array antenna electronically
steers its beam over a wide portion of the sky. It can communicate
with satellites passing overhead without mechanically moving very much.
The direction depends on where you are.
In most of the continental U.S., it tilts north.
In parts of the Southern Hemisphere, it often tilts south.
Near the poles, the orientation can be different.
Some newer Starlink models have no motors and simply lie flat after installation, steering the beam electronically.
As Starlink continues launching satellites, the preferred pointing
direction may become less critical in some areas, but avoiding
interference with geostationary satellites is still an important
design consideration.
So even with thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit, the dish
points north primarily to protect the geostationary satellite belt to
the southrConot because that's where the Starlink satellites are --------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.
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