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Setting up Starlink

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Setting up Starlink

#111

Post by ShockedUnicorn »

tyingq wrote: post #69
oxplot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that one can use any router with the dish. Basically the dish provides you with a NATed private IP which you can assign to the WAN interface of your router of choice and go from there.

Oh, that's interesting. Is the router then completely just a commodity thing that has no specific Starlink functionality at all? Edit: Some reddit posts suggests the Starlink App doesn't work if you don't use the router. But also that the app isn't terribly useful outside of the "obstructions view", which is mostly a one-time need during installation.

The starlink app works with your own router, you just need to set up a static route.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jqhoqz/starlink_a...

Re: Setting up Starlink

#112

Post by geerlingguy »

tzs wrote: post #96
parsimo2010 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons... Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old…

> Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. Is it transmitting anything to the satellite when you are not actually trying to send internet data?

It's definitely doing... something. I had my Kill-A-Watt in it for a few hours with some usage and lots of idle periods, and between the dish and router, power consumption was never below 94W. Average around 104W, peaks at 124W.

Motors weren't being used during my measurement period either.

The dish gets pretty warm in operation (it was already a warm spring day, so it wasn't trying to de-ice or anything).

Re: Setting up Starlink

#113

Post by geerlingguy »

StringyBob wrote: post #49
poisonborz wrote: post #31

> It's powered through PoE++ (using around 100W of power continuously) Not familiar with Sat gear, but this number seems extremely high to me for just powering an antenna (and some motors occasionally)

There’s a pretty crazy amount of electronics in the dish. They are likely selling it at well below cost at present. Teardown showing PCB at: https://youtu.be/iOmdQnIlnRo?t=2152 And more detailed RF analysis at https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg

The CEO just mentioned first version of the dish cost $3000 to manufacture, and it's currently down to $1500. Major goal is to reduce manufacturing cost, since they're selling the thing for $500 and taking a loss right now.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#114

Post by geerlingguy »

tester756 wrote: post #75

>Unfortunately, since Annie's farm was 60 miles (100 km) away from my house, she seemed to be outside my assigned 'cell' of coverage: It cannot be changed somewhat dynamically? e.g by call to SpaceX? >(she works remotely for Reputation) How's that relevant?

Because a lot more people these days are moving out to more remote areas and working remotely where it was just not possible in years past. Starlink would open up a lot more parts of the non-urban world to this possibility.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#115

Post by yokem55 »

tyingq wrote: post #69
oxplot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that one can use any router with the dish. Basically the dish provides you with a NATed private IP which you can assign to the WAN interface of your router of choice and go from there.

Oh, that's interesting. Is the router then completely just a commodity thing that has no specific Starlink functionality at all? Edit: Some reddit posts suggests the Starlink App doesn't work if you don't use the router. But also that the app isn't terribly useful outside of the "obstructions view", which is mostly a one-time need during installation.

It works fine if you add a static interface route to 192.168.100.1/32 on the wan interface of your router.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#116

Post by Robotbeat »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #92
Robotbeat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

550km is the closest approach. Usually it will be at least sqrt(2) times that (ie at least a slant angle of 45 degrees), maybe 2 times that. Plus the latency from the Gateway to the actual server. And the Gateways can have even greater slant angle to the satellite than the mobile terminals.

I don't think it'll usually be at a slant angle of at least 45°. The beta requires a field of view of 100° after tilting. I can't find the maximum tilt angle, but SpaceX has authorization to transmit only 25° degrees above the horizon, so the maximum slant angle is 65°.

But think what that means in terms of SOLID angle, not linear angle.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#117

Post by freedomben »

0x426577617265 wrote: post #95
freedomben wrote: post #73

I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…

I use pfsense with the Protectli -- what exactly are you doing with CentOS just manually configuring as a FW for your LAN? Is the upload/download speed the same? Does your public IP frequently change? EDIT: Ah -- CGNAT. Missed that part.

Yep, I just enable IPv4 packet forwarding and use firewalld to manage ports. I use dnsmasq to provide DHCP and DNS services.

Here are my config files if you're interested. I've redacted my domain and some of the mac addresses. One of these is a shell script that sets up the firewall: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/f8a50c7a98c07171a99c419a5...

Re: Setting up Starlink

#118

Post by bcrl »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #74
labcomputer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency in this case is dominated by time-of-flight to the satellite. At 100 Mbps with a 40 ms latency, there are about 2 megabits in the air between the ground station and CPE.

> Latency in this case is dominated by time-of-flight to the satellite. Is it though? Starlink orbits at 550 km, time-of-flight from ground to satellite to ground would be only 3.7ms, twice that makes ~20% of the roundtrip latency.

There are more than 2 roundtrips. Any MAC that has to perform time division multiplexing on a shared uplink has to poll all base stations over time to figure out which ones have data to transmit, and how much data is queued. Once the satellite knows how much data the ground station has to transmit, it assigns sufficient timeslots, transmits the assignment and then waits for data to come back. This is very similar to PON networks where upstream is shared, but the difference is sub-1ms latency vs 4-5ms latency. Sadly, this does have unfortunate latency implications for how long web pages take to load and render. Streaming video should, however, work swimmingly.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#119

Post by geerlingguy »

Fiahil wrote: post #105
freedomben wrote: post #73

I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…

How is the power consumption compared to a regular router + fiber/ADSL dongle ?

I can answer that I've been monitoring the full setup (dish + router) through a Kill-A-Watt for a few days, and it never goes below 94W, and averages a little over 100W.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#120

Post by geerlingguy »

freedomben wrote: post #106
geerlingguy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their router uses OpenWRT and supposedly you can hit it at 192.168.1.1, but when I try that I get a redirect to www.starlink.com

I did the same thing and got the same redirect. I haven't experimented with anything except GET / but it would be interesting to try throwing some params in there and trying other paths.

Yeah, after another week or so to get my initial impressions with the router as-is, I'm going to do some more experiments and also swap out a couple other routers to see what I can do.
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