I wanted to provide an update for a few fellow members who have inquired about our Starlink journey.  I'll do this in multiple parts, focusing on the modifications step by step, each in it's own post, explaining the reasons for each modification as I go.

A bit if background:

I work remotely, and we live on Harlequin, our Hinckley Sou'Wester 42, from May until October.  Last season we used a 4g hotspot with service provided by https://www.ispmint.com/ but this service limited us to use in the US, and performance was spotty in some anchorages.

We purchased the Starlink Roam (Dishy McFlatface) in March, and have been steadily modifying the dish, and the power setup for it over the past two months. The goal was to optimize power consumption.  Dishy gets power for the phased array antenna over POE, and ensuring the efficiency of the transfer of power from the point of injection, to the dish, is critical.

Starlink ships with its own router, which provides the POE used by the phased array (48+v DC).

If you can get power to the dish via other means, like a POE injector, you do not need the AC powered Starlink wifi router, which also lacks any additional network ports.

Many have asked about the performance.  It's good, up to 200Mbit down, and we've seen anywhere from 4-20Mbit upload.  Not stunning by modern fiber service performance, but better than 4G by a fair margin.

Roam is permitted in all the areas allowed in your local jurisdiction that are shown on the Starlink service map in blue, with a US$2 per GB surcharge for priority data in the "black" or "ocean" grids.

Here's an image of the global coverage as of May 1:



Here in the Pacific Northwest. Notice how the coverage works out once you get away from land too far. The black areas is where the mobile priority data surcharges begin to take effect (this is still a better deal than most satellite plans):



Thankfully, this covers pretty much any place you might want to anchor, and a lot of the area between anchorages.  When the time comes to use data for downloading GRIB data or send email, you can simply enable mobile priority and pay the $2/GB surcharge.

Powering Dishy with DC Power
We searched for a long time before settling on https://boondocker.io/ for the POE injection.  YouTube is awash in van-lifers who have MacGuyver'd solutions for injecting the requisite power into Dishy, but ABYC, blah, blah.. I wanted something elegant..

Boondocker's board is a work of art. Having made my fair share of boards over the years I can tell you, these guys did their homework.  Japanese Nichicon caps are another good indication of how these guys went to extra expense to ensure quality.





I opted for the optional case, and installed the board just behind the power panel in my nav station.  I thought briefly about sending 12v DC using some 6 gauge wire to a location closer to the antenna, but felt the risk of getting the power injector wet and causing a failure wasn't worth the potential improvement in power efficiency I'd gain by shortening the POE run.



In my next post, I'll be talking about how we modified the dish, notably about how our approach departs from others who have posted their Dishy mods online.

Thanks Jonathan,

Mine arrived but luckily Im still allowed my roaming option…

I’m having mine professionally installed to be powered off my solar… I hope you don’t mind me sharing your report for ideas? I certainly will be making use of your very kind offer should there be any questions.

Wishing you a fab bank holiday weekend,

Fair Winds,


Sonia
SY Salacia

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Sonia Johal - 5 May 2023

Thanks Jonathan,Mine arrived but luckily Im still allowed my roaming option…I’m having mine professionally installed to be powered off my solar… I hope you don’t mind me sharing your report for ideas? I certainly will be making use of your very kind offer should there be any questions.Wishing you a fab bank holiday weekend,Fair Winds,SoniaSY Salacia

Absolutely, feel free to use anything you need from here.

If you're powering from solar you likely want to wire the POE injector right off your main electrical panel, and eliminate as much of the wire run as possible.  Run nice, fat gauge wires to the POE injector.  The dish draws 100w@48v for the entire power-up cycle, so it's a power hungry appliance.  The little wifi router I used has been great, and runs on almost zero power.

We have Lithium batteries, so we have adequate reserves to run Dishy for days, but I still turn it off when not using given it's appetite for energy.

I STRONGLY advise getting the boondocker.io injector.  I tried two others and they were too sketchy for a marine application, one got very hot.  Boondocker's runs nice and cool, and is made from quality electronic components.  I can't say enough good things about them.  It's the best $150 I spent on the whole project.

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Jonathan Flack - 5 May 2023

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Sonia Johal - 5 May 2023

Thanks Jonathan,Mine arrived but luckily Im still allowed my roaming option…I’m having mine professionally installed to be powered off my solar… I hope you don’t mind me sharing your report for ideas? I certainly will be making use of your very kind offer should there be any questions.Wishing you a fab bank holiday weekend,Fair Winds,SoniaSY Salacia

Absolutely, feel free to use anything you need from here.

If you're powering from solar you likely want to wire the POE injector right off your main electrical panel, and eliminate as much of the wire run as possible.  Run nice, fat gauge wires to the POE injector.  The dish draws 100w@48v for the entire power-up cycle, so it's a power hungry appliance.  The little wifi router I used has been great, and runs on almost zero power.

We have Lithium batteries, so we have adequate reserves to run Dishy for days, but I still turn it off when not using given it's appetite for energy.

I STRONGLY advise getting the boondocker.io injector.  I tried two others and they were too sketchy for a marine application, one got very hot.  Boondocker's runs nice and cool, and is made from quality electronic components.  I can't say enough good things about them.  It's the best $150 I spent on the whole project.

Hi all,
I read the following series of comments on another stream and, although quite ignorant of the topic, thought that this might be of interest here. With permission, I have copied and pasted their comments.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Here is some more information on Starlink at sea:
https://www.yachtingworld.com/all-latest-posts/starlink-at-sea-all-change-for-cruisers-145597?utm_term=067605B7-6200-4E19-A30C-3CC65FBCEB31&utm_campaign=F0BD7058-F52D-447F-B2FD-A269004F0791&utm_medium=email&utm_content=3FD76EDE-B714-4897-993B-AAB182F53A1E&utm_source=SmartBrief

To add to his answer of your second question.

You wrote "it would be great, as I think you say, that we could switch back & forth between our current “Standard+Portability service” & the “Maritime/Mobility service” depending on monthly needs?."

Starlink no longer offers the “Residential+Portability Option". When Starlink announced the 2nd round of price hikes they also announced that they were removing the Portability Option. The Portability Option was the extra $25.00/month you could pay to make your dish 'portable,' or able to be used in multiple locations like the RV service. They allowed existing customers with the "Residential" plan with the "Portability Option" to keep it. In other words, they "grandfathered" that plan, but only for existing users already on that plan. However, once you switch plans, you can never return to the "Residential" plan with the "Portability Option".

If you have the "Residential" plan (now called "Standard" plan) with the "Portability Option", and you want to keep it, do not change plans.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s an excellent post. One thing I would add to anybody considering disabling the motors is that it isn’t really needed anymore. Once the boat starts moving the dish will orient itself horizontally anyway.

It may be worth doing if you don’t want to wait for it to figure itself out, or if you are swinging 180 degrees at anchor but even then we’ve found that as more and more satellites are in orbit it doesn’t seem to matter where the dish points were getting reasonably good connectivity most of the time.
To answer points one and two, I have a gen 1 Starlink dish, I’m using the regional plan with roaming, and I opted in to priority data which is needed for ocean use for this passage although it isn’t being enforced yet.

It isn’t at least as far as I can tell an option to use the maritime/mobility plan without the high performance dish, but the priority data option is pretty cost effective for short periods offshore.

We’ll be switching back and forth between global/regional/mobile etc once we get to our next cruising grounds.

Right now I’m about 800 miles offshore on the way to the gambier islands and it hasn’t missed a beat. That said we still have our iridium go as a backup as when we left the new plans were still a bit ambiguous and it wasn’t entirely clear what combos would be supported so I wanted a backup.

We’ll probably still keep the go for ocean passages or switch to a garmin Inreach/bivistick or similar device in case things go south.

Starlink won’t warranty the non high performance dishes for in motion/ocean use so if it breaks you’ll need to buy a new one but they are allowing you to use it within their terms of service now - something that wasn’t permitted (although it worked just fine) until recently.

We’ve had Starlink on board for about a year, I work remotely from the boat and it has opened up cruising areas that just weren’t an option for me before, the dish has been hanging off the back of the boat in all weather including hurricane Kay last fall and seems to be doing just fine, of course there’s no real way to predict at what point it will succumb to the marine environment but it does seem to be pretty robust.

Time will tell how aggressively they restrict use at sea, the consensus is generally that nearshore will continue to be classed as onshore in which case paying a couple of dollars per gigabyte on a passage is a good deal. If they are more aggressive it might generally work out cheaper to switch a dedicated maritime plan depending on how much data you consume.

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Dick - 20 May 2023

Starlink won’t warranty the non high performance dishes for in motion/ocean use so if it breaks you’ll need to buy a new one but they are allowing you to use it within their terms of service now - something that wasn’t permitted (although it worked just fine) until recently.

We’ve had Starlink on board for about a year, I work remotely from the boat and it has opened up cruising areas that just weren’t an option for me before, the dish has been hanging off the back of the boat in all weather including hurricane Kay last fall and seems to be doing just fine, of course there’s no real way to predict at what point it will succumb to the marine environment but it does seem to be pretty robust.

The high performance dish consumes twice the power of the "Dishy" RV unit, and given what we've seen (4-6A under normal conditions) that would make the power draw close to 100Ah per work day, which is a bit outside the power budget for most cruising sailors who have other systems like Refrigeration, etc. to run.  It's also extremely expensive, so you can likely get 4 RV dishes and modify them before you hit the cost of the high performance dish (double the size as well).  I don't see any upside to not just carrying a spare if it comes to that.

Starlink has been very up front about the plans.  If you are in a blue cell on the maps I provided your roaming plan covers you on the content you have listed as home continent, however if you touch a black cell, you need the priority roaming which comes at a $2/gb premium.  We opt into that when absolutely necessary (it can be done on demand), but power the dish off when not downloading weather/coms offshore.

For most of us, 2gb is a lot of grib files, so I can't imagine spending more than $20-30 for data on a crossing.  We'll keep everyone posted as we make our way north this summer.