Starlink setup

[KennyM]

Greetings,

I have decided to go with a Starlink Gen3 for my boondocking this year as all my camping is boondocking. I want to make as few holes in the compartments in the living area as possible. I am thinking of running the router in my passthrough compartment and running the power cable through the wall into the battery compartment where I will have a 500 watt pure sine wave inverter to plug into and connect to the batteries. I am hoping I can mount the router to the wall between the passthrough/battery/generator wall for the wireless (do you think I can get a good enough signal to the living area from there?)
I also have 200 watts of portable solar panels to help out.

If I can mount the router on this wall then I don't have to penetrate the wall to the living area. I am thinking I should get a good enough signal from this location. I want to keep things as portable as possible as I will take down the Starlink dish when I am not at the trailer. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Kenny

 

[taskswap]

I have the gen 2. I'm not 100% clear on your specific question but I'll give you some data points that may help.

My setup takes 60-70W continuously. If the snow-melt heater kicks on that ups it to 100W. I run it all the time even though they have a sleep-mode scheduler because I have a weather station that fails to reconnect if it's been offline more than an hour or so. So figure a daily consumption of 1.7kWh to be safe. 200W of solar will help but is not enough to be its only power source because on cloudy/low-light days you might only get a few "charging hours" out of your panel. Ideally you'd want 2-3 days of battery capacity and enough solar to fully recharge on a "good day".

There are PoE kits you can get that convert the unit to run off 12VDC. Inverters have a lot of loss in them and the smaller units are usually the worst efficiency-wise. Personally, I've bought two options off Amazon and neither worked for me so YMMV, but it might be worth exploring. There are TONS of threads on this on Reddit, and even a Subreddit dedicated to the Starlink. They would be the best sources of answers on Gen3 questions you have.

Placement of the router does matter but not enough to really worry about. Starlink bandwidth varies by location and time of day way more than any other service. I'll go from 50Mbps to 160Mbps when usage is high or low. At one time I had my router actually outside on a table for several months (it's fairly weatherproof). Moving it into the master bedroom gave me about a 30Mbps boost - noticeable, but less than the daily swings so not exactly earth-shattering.

I don't know what they did with the Gen3 router but the Gen2 is technically wall-mountable but not very well. You can find brackets online that make a much stronger mount and I'd definitely do that in a camper.

 

[KennyM]

Thanks for the info it makes sense. I will be running the unit on a 500 watt sine wave inverter and I have a Victron stunt to monitor the batteries. My batteries are 365 watt 6 volt deep cycle batteries. Plus if they get very low I can crank on the generator.

I am considering changing out my charger so it will charge lithium batteries and changing the batteries too. Just a spendy proposition to do this. I camp alone and don't use much electricity and won't run the Starlink except for maybe 2 to 4 hours a day. Everywhere I camp is off grid so I need to be mindful of the electricity use.

I have two wall mounts one for the router and one for the power supply. I will start off by mounting them in the passthrough storage to the front and bore a hole into the generator/batteries area to the inverter and to the batteries. Then the router will face toward the living area wall for the wife. I am hoping this will be adequate so I don't have to run the wire into the living area.

I am hoping to get out into the desert and I will set it all up before I go camping for a test run.

Kenny

 

[taskswap]

You should be fine. The starlink router is pretty powerful. We have our fifth-wheel parked on our homestead right now with the router in the master bedroom. I have a pair of Wifi cameras out on a shed and a partially built house and they connect just fine from 100' away through several walls. If all your "users" are inside your camper you might not notice a speed difference at all.

If you're turning your unit on and off you might want to know that the Starlink boots very slowly, especially the longer it's been off. 3-4 minutes in many cases for me. No idea about the Gen3. Also, it's a little sensitive to power failures. Off/on is fine, but if it sees off/on/off/on/off/on rapidly (like if your low-voltage cutoff is cycling because your batteries are just about flat - ask me how I know this) it can trigger a factory reset in the router, and you have to go into the app to reconfigure it. It's rare but has happened to me twice so far.

 

[KennyM]

Thank you again,

I will be the only one in the trailer when out camping and I will turn it off after each use which might be once in the morning and once in the evening. I will bring the dish in when I am leaving to ride and maybe at night depending on where I am camping. The place I go a few times a year is out in the desert where there isn't anyone for many miles and nobody ever comes into my camp. Here in SW Idaho people are very respectful about coming into your camp.

Thanks again for the info, I am guessing the signal will go through the compartment walls to the inside of the living area. Also on that wall I will mount my sine wave inverter to the batteries and plug in the disc to the inverter. I will be able to monitor my batteries via bluetooth from the Victron shunt.

Kenny