+x+xThanks 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.