How to route Starlink Cables

[Joshua 15]

What is the best way to route the Startlink Cables in my Cyclone 4250?

I just purchased a 2016 today. I was lucky enough to be invited in one of the first groups to purchase the RV Mini (I think you have to already have a system and you can add this little one as a remote setup for $30 additional each month). My home has the standard starlink. I was hoping to try and put it on the roof somehow and either go through the solar or Coax cable system to connect the antenna to the router inside the Cyclone. Has anyone tried to do this? Any ideas?

 

[david-steph2018]

You should have cables in the roof for satellite dish install. You may try to find these and tie into the lines. If not, see if you can run the cable next to a vent pipe for a tank.

https://manuals.heartlandowners.org/manuals/Electronics/Coax_Layouts/Cyclone_Road_Warrior/Cyclone%20RW%20Torque%20Edge%202015%20COAX.pdf

 

[taskswap]

Roof cable installs are almost certainly not going to work for Starlink. I own one and I can tell you it's a custom/proprietary CAT5e cable with USB-C-style (but not USB-C-compatible) connectors on both ends. Some folks who do DIY POE setups will cut the cable to achieve sophisticated installs but if you don't know what you're doing you can easily wreck it. I just stuff mine through the rubber seal along one of my slide-outs and put the antenna on the roof. It's not elegant, but it's super fast and easy to do.

 

[wdk450]

I drove past a Cyclone with a Starlink antenna out front as I made my way back to my space at Thousand Trails Pio Pico (near San Diego) yesterday evening and noted the Starlink cable routing (remembering this thread I read yesterday morning) and noted that the cable was run on the ground past the entrance steps to the slide seal just to the rear of the steps, and inside via the slide seal.

Question: I have heard that Starlink performance declines where there are a bunch of users in a tight geographical area. That definition would fit the bigger Thousand Trails parks (like this one) where I see Starlink antennas now on almost 1/2 of the rigs. Is this statement about Starlink true? Has anyone experienced it?

 

[taskswap]

Question: I have heard that Starlink performance declines where there are a bunch of users in a tight geographical area. That definition would fit the bigger Thousand Trails parks (like this one) where I see Starlink antennas now on almost 1/2 of the rigs. Is this statement about Starlink true? Has anyone experienced it?

It absolutely does, but in my experience it's still always been better than cell service. In "good times" (like right now, 9pm where I am) I can get 130-150Mbps or more. The worst I've ever had was 25Mbps which is worse than a home cable modem but still better than 90% of the campgrounds I've ever been in or cell hotspots I've dealt with.

I'm a software architect and am hyper-aware of bandwidth, capacity, and so on everywhere I go because I have to be. Take this with a grain of salt anyway, but my general experience has been:

- Starlink bandwidth varies more by TIME. I haven't found the number of dishes I see in a campground to be particularly relevant. But 9-11am and 4-6pm are almost always worse than other times - 3 people on Youtube or Netflix is way more impactful than 25 people checking their email or looking up restaurants. But it's location-independent.

- Cell bandwidth varies by LOCATION. In a given spot I typically (not always, but usually) get about the same bandwidth no matter what time of day it is or how many people are around. But little things like moving my hotspot closer to a window, or being 3 sites over, can make a big difference. Within a half-mile state campground that we've been going to every summer for awhile, there are sites where we just know there will be no service at all, while others will give us 4-5 bars.

I've used every cell booster product under the sun (even the insanely expensive Weboost RV - someone want to buy one for a song? Colorado pickup recommended.) and they do help. But I NEVER think about placement of the Starlink. As long as there isn't a tree over it, it's good to go, any site, any campground, any state. At times with mobile hotspots in weaker areas I'd spend literally hours messing with tweaking the booster direction or trying different sites on different visits. Starlink is more of a "set it and forget it" device.

 

[wdk450]

I pay ATT $65 a month for their best (most data) plan (includes a $25 veterans discount), got the IPhone XR in 2020 under a 3 year payment special of $1 a month ($36), I use the XR hotspot for my laptop, have a Wilson MyFi 4 band cellular amplifier that I only use at Pio Pico ( other places I stay all have 5 bars of signal unamplified - booster and external 20 foot antenna takes 1 bar signal to 5 bars here - antenna aim 40 degrees magnetic to area hilltop peak.). I have been on Dish network for about 20 years now, 10 years in the RV. Cost was originally about $40 a month, now $140 a month for 200 channel package. I add the $140 MLB baseball package during baseball season (paid over 4 months).
I guess I am put off by the Starlink original equipment costs ($600), and $160 a month for internet, but you get much more data and speeds. Also, Musks's original statements that Starlink was originally envisioned as bringing internet to all the poor villages around the world at a price the poor could afford. That hasn't happened.

 

[taskswap]

I pay ATT $65 a month...

I guess I am put off by the Starlink original equipment costs ($600), and $160 a month for internet, but you get much more data and speeds. Also, Musks's original statements that Starlink was originally envisioned as bringing internet to all the poor villages around the world at a price the poor could afford. That hasn't happened.

As a Starlink owner and fan I would still generally say "if you HAVE another option, it's probably better." Whether it's price, performance, reliability, or what-have-you.

Here in Colorado there are places where we camp where cell service isn't "bad," it's literally non-existent because there simply is not a cell phone tower at all. Our homestead in Ft Garland has one nearby, but it's 3G and if you can get data through it at all, you know the weather outside is good without looking out the window. And even many very popular places to camp like Lake Mac in Nebraska (aka "the Nebraska Riviera") have such poor service that cell just isn't an option. Starlink is for those situations.

Starlink is also well suited to full-timers because even the "Unlimited" the major cell carriers offer are not:

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile’s “unlimited” plans just got a $10M slap on the wrist

The carriers must make their ads more transparent.

www.theverge.com

This may change some day, but so far, there are no monthly data caps on Starlink. My admin console says I've used 358GB since January. There are cell phone plans that offer 50GB/mo but most at that level aren't cheaper than Starlink, and that would just cover my average needs - in January I used 63GB. When I was on cellular I used to carry two plans just to have something to switch to in an emergency. We're a family of 7 so baseline Youtube and Netflix usage already puts us well up the ladder, and I'm a software architect by trade and commonly move large files around for work, so my business usage usually sends us through any data caps cellular carriers have. They're fine for occasional use but not really set up for "full timers" if you compare them to home cable modems.

Never listen to anything Musk says, by the way. He's a figurehead, and very little of the innovations at SpaceX, Tesla, et. al. were originally his ideas. He did a good job bringing investment and interest to those companies and hiring good people, but in general, I feel you should judge based on their actions, not their statements. He also gets mis-quoted a lot, and I suspect that's the case with the "poor villages around the world" comment - Starlink had a massive capital outlay to launch its satellites and there's just no way "poor villages" were ever going to subsidize that. They HAD to launch to the US domestic market primarily because that's where the money was. If they hadn't they would be dead already. When it comes to Internet access, Starlink is an objectively viable option for a lot of people, although I'll openly agree that there are plenty of folks it's just not "for".

Folks on the fence for satellite and with other options should almost certainly wait. Today, many Web sites will tell you there are competitors to Starlink but none of them can offer the same coverage (they're "competing" but still cellular, so not apples to apples) or low latency (they're not LEO - Starlink was the first at that). Within the next few years, we WILL see competitors emerge though (Amazon is already working on launches for Kuiper). Competition will drive prices down and force Starlink to innovate even more - they've already got a lower-cost, semi-portable dish and the standard dish price is down to $499 now - almost 20% less than just a year ago. I expect in the next 18 months, if you can wait, there will be more, and cheaper, options out there.