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.