Dishing on Starlink

I feel like updating my Starlink experience.

Today my dish arrived, and as I wrote earlier, I was not as thrilled as I hoped to be when I first gave Elon Musk my deposit. The price had gone up, the promised speed had gone way down, the arrival of faster speeds had been pushed way back, and the installation turned out to be a pain.

Since then, I have fired Starlink up, and I believe I will keep it. I’m not sure yet, but it looks like Starlink Junior, the version I have, is somewhat better than my old wireless system, and it’s cheaper.

When you open the Starlink box, you get two things that matter. The dish and the router. The dish has a cord 75 feet long, and it has molded-in plugs on both ends, so you can forget about splicing it. I think. You plug your router into the wall, plug the dish into the router, and wait.

The only instructions are 4 cartoons on the packaging material, so if you think I’m oversimplifying the instructions, you are wrong. When I say “cartoons,” I mean one-panel cartoons. And there is no text to speak of.

Before you choose a location for the dish, you’re supposed to start the phone app and use it to take video of the sky above. How this is supposed to tell Starlink anything useful, I don’t know. I moved the phone around a lot while I was doing it. I can’t imagine what Starlink thought. The purpose of the exercise is to determine whether you have too many obstructions for the signal to get through.

Using the phone takes a long time, and Starlink doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to hold the phone over your head without getting tired. It also doesn’t tell you how to know when you’re done without holding the phone over your head. The camera has to point at the sky, so you have to be under the phone to read the app, and the app is what tells you you’re finished.

I stuck the dish next to the pool. I had read that it would want a desert-like location with no features other than flat horizons. Figuring that was BS, I decided to try the worst but most convenient location first. If it worked well enough by the pool, I would leave it there.

Of course, it worked poorly, so I climbed out an upstairs window, removed my Dish dish with primitive tools, and hurled it down into the yard. I stuck the Starlink dish in the pole it had occupied, with no real attachment. If a bird sits on it, it will move.

When I went inside and turned on the PC to see if I had a new network showing up, Starlink sort of took over and sent me to a page that did what the phone app was supposed to do, except for the video stuff. I learned I had a new network named “Stinky.”

Really? Is that a good joke, coming from a man named Musk?

I changed the name of the network to something like Trump-o-rama and started trying to use the web.

Since then, I have used an Internet speed test a few times, and my downloads are ranging between 8 and 55 megs. That means they’re way better than my old system when they’re fast, and they’re about the same when they’re bad.

Uploads are not quite as exciting. Sometimes they’re a lot better than they used to be, but I have gotten figures as low as 0.25 megs. Maybe I’ll only be able to upload Youtubes when the wind is blowing the right way.

We are having wonderful dry weather, but fortunately, it rained today, and I was still able to use Starlink, so there’s one question answered.

I went to Ace Hardware and got eight feet of galvanized tubing. For some reason, tubing for fences costs $30 at Home Depot and $17 at Ace. I modified it so it could be attached to my old Dish dish mount, and I’m in the process of painting it with truck bed coating. That will look marginally better than bare zinc. I plan to add 8 feet to the height of the dish, and I’ll fasten it to the pole with hose clamps.

Elon, or as I call him, Stinky, decided not to make his cables spliceable, so it looks like running them into the house will require holes as big as the plugs. I haven’t found a way to cut a cable, thread it through a small hole, and reattach it. Right now, the plan is to try to use the old Dish hole. I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t want to lie on my back on the roof in the rain, but I’m hoping it’s big enough to take Stinky’s plug.

All in all, things look promising. If upload speeds can be improved by raising the dish, I will be all set.

What Stinky has done is extremely impressive, regardless of the little issues. A lot of people around the world can now open a box, run an app, and have acceptable or possibly excellent Internet coverage in an hour or two. This is now possible in places where Internet coverage didn’t exist before Stinky. If you don’t think it’s impressive, consider all the huge corporations that have utterly failed where he has succeeded. They didn’t even see the need for his kind of system.

He’s going to murder Hughes. Their systems don’t perform as well, and getting help from the their customer service has been compared to trying to text the pope.

He should make a better effort to communicate with customers. That would be helpful.

I’m not sure about the non-spliceability of the cables. I’m checking it out. If it turns out splicing is possible, the odds I will return my dish will go down like Stinky’s estimates of my download speeds.