Welcome back, everybody. In this video, I cut the leg off of our Starlink Dishy
McSquareface and flat-mount it on our roof using this 3D-printed
wedge mount adapter that I designed in SolidWorks. If you enjoy these handwritten subtitles and translations,
Please let me know that it's worthwhile in the comments. And you're probably asking yourself, why would this handsome Sasquatch cut
the leg off a perfectly good Starlink? And that's a great question. And because I know this video's likely
going to attract a lot of viewers that may not know who we are
and what we're doing, allow me two minutes to give
you the backstory. In 2014, we started building our own off-road
expedition truck from scratch in our home garage. It was built to be rugged, robust, and to get us off the beaten path much
past the end of the road where a typical RV would get stopped. And it's done that very well taking us
to the Arctic Ocean of Northern Canada down through the states, Baja, Mexico,
and all throughout Central America. And then this past June, we
shipped our rig to South America, and we've driven it all throughout
Colombia and now into Ecuador. And back when we were
still building our rig, Starlink was just announced and I thought, It would be awesome to have
satellite internet on the go, but it's going to be too expensive and
it's probably not going to happen before we get our truck done. And so, for
the first four years of our journey, we relied pretty heavily
on our MoFi LTE router, buying sim cards in
every country we went to, and using our long-range
directional antennas. First, we used the MoFi 4500, and then more recently we
upgraded to the MoFi 5500. You can see the video up here. But more and more we're seeing
that our cellular connection, even though it has full bars,
has really pathetic data rates. There's no lead in the
pencil, as they say. The cellular towers in these areas are
probably saturated or they've got an old US Robotics modem sitting
in the booth at the bottom. But one day I was looking at the Starlink
website coverage map and a little pocket of coverage popped up in Colombia. And even though I knew it was a little
bit expensive in the United States at about $135 a month, and knowing full well that it
would be out of the budget for us, I jokingly added it to the
cart. And lo and behold, it was 210,000 Colombian pesos
for a month of RV service, which works out to $44 a month. It turns out they have a deeply
discounted rate for developing markets. So we ordered it. It shipped from
Hawthorne, California on Friday, and it arrived in Bogota,
Colombia Monday morning. Look how happy that Sasquatch is!! And we've been using it all throughout
Colombia with really good speeds. And even though we're outside
of the officially covered area, we're still getting 250
megabits per second. Now that we've moved into Ecuador,
it's not even offered here yet, but we're still getting really
good speed. And for what it does, the hardware is amazingly
small and compact, but it still has a few
drawbacks for the way we travel. You know, it's not so small. This is the box that comes in and
I imagine for RVers who have a 5th wheel trailer and they want to take
it out to the lake for the week or two weeks or they're going to a state
park or something set up is not so bad, just pull it out of the box, clip in the tripod, put it somewhere, it's got a clear shot of the sky, and then hook up the router on the inside. But I've done this over a hundred times
already and it's getting a little bit annoying. Further, you can see the dish is
getting a little bit banged up, marred up a little bit, bit
of a ding here in the face, and the cable's sheath is
got a ding in it from being stuffed through our mounting pole. Another disadvantage for us is that
when we're in route somewhere actively traveling, we can't really
use it. For example, if we just stop quickly
at a grocery store, we can't check our email or
update the maps or whatever. Or if we're street
camping in a small town, I can't just lay it out on the street. I need to somehow get it up to
the roof in a secure location, and that's really a pain in the
plantain. So let's cut this thing off. Now, I imagine some of you
have already commented, isn't that leg needed for aiming
the dish at the satellites? And while that was true in the beginning
when there were only a few hundred satellites, now that number is up in the thousands
and they're launching 60 more every week. So in fact, the dish can point straight up and
using its phased array antenna, direct the beam and
still get great signal. Not only have I proven that to myself by
placing the dish on two chair backs and letting the leg swing around, or other times I've used a ratchet strap
to restrict the movement of the dish and keep it flat. But many, many other people have already
cut the leg off the dish. And the nail in the coffin of the
motorized leg debate is that SpaceX now offers a high performance flat mount dish. The only catch is that it's $2,500
bucks, five times the cost of this one. So I'll settle for my "Medium
Performance Flat Mount Dish™" So let's tie into this! Like I said, there are many others who have cut this
open before me and I've gleaned all I can from watching their videos.
And to summarize what I've learned, there are two sections inside the antenna. The business end is the
phased array antenna, and it's basically just flat. It's the first two centimeters
at the front of the dish, and that's where all the
electronics are housed. And that compartment is completely
sealed. There's no screws, no way to open it short of cutting
it open and cutting it off. And the second compartment is
here at the back of the dome, and that's where the motors live
and it's vented to the atmosphere. Because this connection here
where the leg meets is not sealed, they have little air vent/drains
you can see here in the corners. And that is basically the outline
of where we need to cut to cut off the motorized section. So I've just powered it
up to get the leg upright. Now we can unplug it and cut it off. Now of course I could do like everyone else, take my side grinder and cut
the majority of the plastic off, but then I would need to seal everything
up to keep the electronics water tight. And given my working conditions here in
the dirt and the grass and the side of the road in Ecuador, I'm not confident
that I'll be able to do that. Further, there's really no benefit for me
because I already have this giant expanding solar array on our
roof that's 11 centimeters tall. And so there's no benefit in me
making this any thinner than that. So to minimize the risk of damage to
the antenna array itself and to mitigate any risks of it not being sealed up
properly and humidity and moisture getting into the antenna compartment, I'm
not even going to breach into there. Instead, I've marked a line one centimeter
inset from the 4 vent holes, and I'm going to drill the corners and
then cut that off and then that will access only the vented
motor compartment. Okay, welcome to my office everyone. While I'm covered in dust and stuff. I'm going to switch to a flap disc
and just go around the whole perimeter here in preparation for
gluing it to my 3D mount. That way I just need to clean up once. So there it is all
cleaned up. As I showed, I took a flap disc to the perimeter
to give it a little bit of bite, little "tooth" for the
adhesive to grab onto. And the inside turned out really nice. The cut came out perfectly
where I wanted it to, and I have about a foot of
ethernet cable ready to tie into. Now as far as mounting, of course, I thought about using some angle aluminum
profile and make a frame around the perimeter and then somehow, you know, build it up so that it was
four inches up off the surface. And I even have this aluminum profile
that came from a salvaged solar panel and that actually hugs
the side of the dish perfectly, but it's not deep enough. So
again, I would've needed to cut the whole back off and then find an
aluminum plate that size and silicone it all closed. And so I
wasn't interested in that. So I thought I'd kick it up
a notch and CAD model myself, a socketing wedge mount. Now there are a couple of cottage
industry outfits that make such flat mount dishes already they're vacuum formed
or CNC cut from a solid plate of heavy plastic and then you would cut
the whole thing off and silicone it into the mount. But they cost almost
as much as Starlink itself, and I probably can't even ship it
to Ecuador anyway, so as I said, I designed my own wedge mount. I made it so the back edge is at the same
height as the solar array on the roof, and the front is as low as it can go
before the body of the dish hits the roof. That gives it a little bit of a slope
to allow the rainwater to run off. Then I just needed to match
the shape of my mount to match the contour of the back
of the dish. Thankfully, SpaceX has provided CAD
models for our dish. So all I needed to do was take
that model and put it into my model and then create a cavity and
subtract from my mount so that it matched the contour of the dish. Now of course, I can't print
something this big on my printer, so I split the model up into six pieces
and then I added these 10 centimeter long pieces of aluminum angle in there
to span the joints and then the screws run through here and that'll give
it some strength across the joint. And then they also serve
as my mounting tabs, which will be glued down to our roof
surface using Sikaflex®. Anyway, those mounting tabs allow me to pull
the screws and just lift the whole thing off the roof if I ever need to
take it off for whatever reason. Then it was time to print
out all six segments. The larger L-shaped pieces took
about 16 hours each to print, and the straight ones were about 12 hours, so about 90 hours of printing
over the course of a week. Once the printing was done, I removed all the supports from where
the aluminum reinforcement angles go. Then I glued the segments all together
and sanded away the fuzzies and the worst of the layer lines. Then I gave
it a couple coats of primer, couple coats of gloss white paint, and if you stand back
and squint and set your YouTube player resolution to 240p,
I'd say it looks pretty good. If you would like to have
such a Starlink wedge mount, I freely shared the CAD files
down in the description. It's about $15 worth of
filament to print one out. It's a really good reason to get a 3D
printer or get a friend with a 3D printer. Alright, so obviously we're going to
need to connect the original
connector back to this severed cable and we're not going
to be able to reuse this proprietary connector. So off with his head. Dude! I wasn't ready. Anyway, I got a RJ45 shielded
coupler and the crimp on connectors here. But before we can
connect these two back together, I need to take this cable and string it
through some holes in our rooftop solar array. Okay, so yesterday I crawled up here and
flipped these two solar panels upside down and drilled holes through
the aluminum frame and installed these 3D-printed grommets. So today all I needed to do was
pull that wire through the grommet. Alright, so as you can clearly see, I'm up on the rooftop now with
the dish ready to install. And now I just need to crimp on
the the RJ45 connector so that we can use our watertight coupler. I did do a little bit of prep
while I was on the ground. I separated and isolated
the motor wires with shrink tubing. I've installed the aluminum angle mounting tabs, and I also took a wire wheel,
which I still have on the drill, such a brass wire wheel, but it's pretty coarse and I
gouged the bottom of these parts so that it's got some grip,
some, some "tooth" in it. So that's the work I've done in advance.
Now we're ready to connect the wires. So I've got the connectors here
and the crimper and everything, but before we go crimping this together,
something very important to know. And that is that SpaceX used a
non-standard wire order for these wires. And so because they're
using power on all four of the pairs and so the wires
aren't in the right order, I'm not going to get into a ton of detail. Suffice to say that the
wire order is different. So I'm going to refer to that
swapped green and blue pair as X-Swapped. So that's
the first thing to know. Let's get to crimping. So before
I get too carried away and forget, I'm going to put the nut and the grommet from the wire coupler over the cable. It's probably possible to
squeeze it over the connector, but I don't want to forget. Alright, so there it is all lined up.
Orange-Stripe, Orange, Blue-Stripe, Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown. So got that all in and Kerchunk! And now we just do the same
to the other side. Alright, I've got it all lined up on the
insert here. Again, that wire color, Orange-Stripe, Orange, Blue-Stripe,
Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown. That just helps line all the wires
up with their respective positions on the inside. You want to make sure they've all
come to the front of the connector, as they have. And crimp. So like I said, this is a shielded, supposedly watertight coupler. So you put these nuts over
here and then this rubber gland in there as you tighten this, hopefully you guys will be able to see the blue plastic gets compressed, pardon me, the blue rubber gets compressed
uptight against the shield. So as I said, I've cut some extra slots in
here for zip ties and I did that because I found this coupler
fits really nice up inside there. And just for future self future-proofing, I put some wire flags on these
cables marking that they are X-Swapped so that I don't
mix them up in the future. Pretty unlikely I would, but that's that. And then the cable just
comes out this little slot up here. And we're basically
ready to stick it down. Alright, so I'm going to glue down
about here. And like I said before, I'm going to use Sikaflex® to bond
those aluminum brackets directly to our composite panels. And
like I said before, again, that's how our whole sliding
pneumatic solar panel array, it's glued down and all of these
composite panels that make up our living quarters on our truck, they're all
just glued to these aluminum frames. These rivets really don't count for much
for the overall strength of this thing. But surface prep is super important
because if you were to just glue this down to the gel coat, it's so smooth and shiny or you know, your clear coat on your Sprinter van, it would just peel off
and Starlink, or solar, or whatever you're gluing
down would just go flying. So surface prep is super important. So I'm going to first pop
the dish out here find where I want to put it And then mark those positions
on the roof and then give them a little bit of a scuff. Another trick I used while building
the truck was to use a gasket or a spacer in between the aluminum
and the composite panels. And that allows the Sikaflex® to flex. If you just put together the
two parts you're trying to join and squeeze out all the adhesive, there's nothing left to flex. And so here I'm doing kind
of the same thing with some 3M VHB, just putting a strip at the front and
the back of each of these tabs so that when I put the Sikaflex® down and set it in place, that it acts as a little bit of a spacer
so that all of the glue doesn't squeeze out the sides. And it's also nice because then it doesn't slide around on you
while you're moving it. Alright, so there's nothing
left to do, but do her. Put a bead all the way around
except for where the VHB is. Good luck buddy. As you can see, it just squeezed
out so nicely all the way around, Nothing left but the tabs now. I think this is what
they call the money shot. So there it is mostly done. I've gotta come up here yet and
install the solar panels properly. But this is good to go. If I was using
the original Starlink toaster, er uh, router, I could just plug this in and I probably
will and it will work just fine. But instead I'm going to do this elabrate PoE injection system and
we'll get to that in a moment. But first let's do a free "no
strings attached: giveaway. So our last video, I did a little mini review on the
pale blue AA and AAA rechargeable batteries and the folks at Pale Blue
were so happy about that they said they'd supply one of their home conversion
kits as a give away in one of our future videos. How cool is that? The home conversion kit normally
sells for $250 and includes 12 AA batteries, 8 AAA batteries, 4 9V, 4 D cell batteries, plus of course all the cables that you
need for charging and all you have to do to enter the contest is name this dish.
SpaceX calls these Dishy McFlatface, which of course is an
homage to Boaty McBoatface, which was a boat named in in
Britain using an online contest, much the same as this. So
in keeping with this theme, put your best name forward for this dish. The suggestion with the most thumbs
up 30 days after this video goes live will be sent the home conversion kit
anywhere in the US free shipping courtesy of Pale Blue Earth. I don't know, I'm thinking something like Stumpy
McSquareface, or something like that. So that's a freebie. Go put it down in the comments and
everyone thumbs up that one. Anyway, let's go back inside and void our
warranty once again for the second time. Welcome back everyone. Today is three days from now and as you
can see I've got the Starlink here on the counter with all of the
surplus cable still in a heap. So we'll be dealing with that. And Starlink has been working great flat
mount even though it's been shooting through a little bit of trees
we have above us. It's good. And a kind of a funny thing when
I open the debug data in the app, it shows the mast is near vertical
and the motors are healthy, which I guess it's true, they're
probably still in good shape. Another interesting point is for the
last couple months of my testing, I would restrain the dish and prevent
it from moving until it triggered the motors obstructed error on the app
and then it would just stay flat and it could point at the sky, but it would take 15 minutes or so for
it to decide that the motors aren't working and then to turn on the
antenna and try and find the satellites regardless. And I notice now it turns on
and connects within 60 seconds. So that's very interesting. And there's no motor obstructed or
motor stuck warnings any longer. Another thing I thought was interesting
is the obstruction map that the app has inside showing
the visibility of the sky. It would normally be pointing kind of
at an angle up to the north and now ours shows it's completely flat
so it knows the dish is flat. I thought that was pretty interesting.
Okay, as I'm sure you're aware, this is the Starlink wifi
base station router unit and it's not ideal for
overlanders or RVs because it's powered from 110 or
230-volts AC wall plug power. There's no power brick that
converts 110 to 12-volts, for example or 110 to 48-volts DC, so you can't just cut the
wire and connect it to 12-volts. It's a little bit more in
depth of a procedure to convert these. It is possible. I did consider going that route
to convert these to DC power. You can actually slip a thin guitar
string in behind the glass sheet and wrap that around screwdrivers, pull
it through. And then there is a separate power supply board and
a separate WiFi "brain board" and there's I think it's a six pin
header with 48-volts and 12-volts. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but if you're interested in that that's
an option for you. Anyway because this is 120-volt mains power only that we need to run
our inverter all the time just to power Starlink, effectively converting our 12-volt solar
and lithium battery bank to 110-volts to power the Starlink, which then converts it back
to DC voltage to power dishy. And while it's not pulling that much
power, 30 to 40-watts in my testing, our inverter, is the 3kW Victron inverter, it has some overhead as well. A listed efficiency of 93%
and a no load consumption of 25-watts. So that adds 50% overhead just to power the dish. Secondly, although the
Starlink router is very user friendly, it has very little in the way of
advanced features such as load balancing, DHCP assignment, and guest networks, something our MoFi 5500
has in spades. Thirdly, there are no ethernet
ports on this router. You can buy a $50-ish
dollar ethernet adapter, but as it stands now all
of our traffic needs to go to our MoFi 5500 and then
through the wifi repeater function to the Starlink. So
everything's going over wifi twice. Not to mention with the cables coming
out the back and no flat edges on this whole thing, it's kind of a pain to mount
anywhere in a semi fixed way. So instead we got this power
over ethernet injector, which will inject the power from this
12-volt to 48-volt boost converter and inject the PoE power into
the ethernet cable up to the dish. And then the output from this end goes
to the WAN port on our MoFi router. The better benefit of this is that I
can use the MoFi's load balancing to provide internet from any source
that's available, Starlink, cellular, or the wifi repeater, and distribute it to all of
our devices inside the truck. And it's actually really easy to do
despite how complex this diagram makes it look. We just need to crimp on
three more connections and
feed some 48-volt power into the PoE injector. And the other reason I want to cut the
wire is because it's still ridiculously long, so we'll trim it to
something more reasonable. This of course is the wire
that was run up to our rooftop. We'll cut that here and we have it ready to go. Again, Orange-Stripe, Orange,
Blue-Stripe, Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown So that's the cable from the roof crimped. And I put a strain relief and
tab protector on there as well as a X-Swapped flag so that
I don't forget down the road. Now the PoE injector does have
the "Data In/Out" and "PoE In/Out" and the "DC power +/- " labeled,
but they're kind of faint, and they're on the back. So
I've added big bold red labels. So now I know that dishy plugs in here. Now we just need to make a patch cord
from the PoE injector to the router. That bigger jacket is quite tight to
get in the connector, but it is doable. I forgot to mention earlier, but this end that connects to
the router uses the conventional T586B wire color pattern.
Orange-Stripe, Orange Green-Stripe, Blue, Blue-Stripe, Green,
Brown-Stripe, Brown. So there's my little patch cable made!
One end with the X-Swapped wire order, and one end that's the conventional
T586B wire order. All right, there it is, ready to go. I've 3D-printed a little wall mount bracket to hold that
up and so I'll be mounting that up here by our router. But first I want
to do a little experiment. Because I've cut off 57.284 feet of cable, I've crimped on an X-Swapped
end onto the original router end of the cable. And I'm
going to use one of these couplers. To connect this back and then
I'm going to run it off of the Starlink router with much less
cable and run that through our Kill-A-Watt meter and see
if the wattage has dropped
by a measurable amount. So with this much cable removed, the power consumption
does seem to be lower. It is bouncing around
between 27 and 40-watts and I'll need to set this
to watt-hours (Wh) and let it run for an hour to
average the time over an hour, but it looks like it might
be a little bit less just from the reduction in
this length of cable. Another benefit of putting
this X-Swapped connector on the router end of the cable is that I can
just use a coupler like this as I'm doing now and run it in its
original configuration. If I ever need to do that for a
firmware update or for some reason it's required, I can still easily do that. So I've got it all installed up
behind our second monitor here. You'll need to forgive the close
quarters videography, but there it is. So this should all be very clear by now, but basically our wire comes down from
the roof along this air conditioner duct and then pops up here
into the PoE injector. The power DC to DC converter
gets its power from inside this compartment and then it just runs up
into the connector and then of course the patch cable goes into the
WAN port on the router and then to tidy up the wires, I designed these CAT5 wire
clips that are just held to our roof with command strips
for a nice clean install and there's not much else to it.
As soon as I powered it up, the MoFi Router took a IP address from
the dish and it came online as if it was a cable modem that just
got plugged into the WAN port. And I won't bore you with the test rig
but I did do some power consumption testing with the system as you
see it now and over two hours, it averaged 28-watts. So that's a lot better
than what it was before. Well, there you have it, our amputated Starlink dish flat mounted
on the roof in a 3D-printed mount, powered by a DC to DC boost converter. A huge thank you to our
supporting channel members, especially the Elon Tier
member Phurious George. He's up the pesos this month for our
Starlink service. So thank you very much!! Our channel is member supported. It's the contributions of these fine
folks that make it possible for us to make these videos for you guys without
telling you about our sponsor. So if you'd like to be
listed among these legends, click the JOIN button down below and check
out the options that are available to you there. Don't forget to go in the comments and
vote for the best name you can come up with for our Stumpy
McStumperson flat mount dish. The Pale Blue Battery Home
Conversion kit contest will end 30 days from the day this video goes
live. So vote early, vote often. Thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next time.
Starlink folks can learn so neat efficiency tips from this guy! Nice video.
..... this video is 100% gold, he did his homework and nothing is left to guesswork, even pin-out on the RJ45's are noted to make sure you don't screw up. Very professional. You may not have the coin for the expensive router nor want/be able to use a 3D printer but the clear guidelines will allow for a painless conversion with little risk of breaking your new toy.
Very detailed...
DAMN...thanks for sharing this video and your tried and tested work. It blows my mind that engineers at Starlink, didn't friggin consider all the flaws / nuances that you pointed out in your video.
That Starlin router is shite. I mean no ethernet ports, what da ferk? Also, the having to go 'over wi-fi twice' issue is a big one.
That's awesome. Great video and mod!
jason is very creative person.
pretty much anything you can 3D print with won't be as robust in the exterior conditions that marine grade starboard would