Starlink 4 month daily usage update: Install, Tips, Tricks, Usage and Speed Tests! Really! 300 Mbps!

[Music] so [Music] hey guys welcome back uh today we're up on the roof in front of the starlink pole uh starlink is this you make flat faces right above me here about four feet above my head and today in the northwoods we're doing a little bit of adjustments i want to bring the dish a little bit closer to the roof line there was some concerns with perhaps some lightning issues and just overall overall height and i think i could probably drop it down a little bit but we'll see i mean i've got a shorter pull i'm going to install and bring the dish down a little bit further but before i do that i want to talk about a few things kind of give a update on starlink as a whole now i ordered starlink on december 10 to 2020 and i got it there shortly thereafter maybe five days later i think i ordered on a thursday or friday i got it tuesday or a wednesday and i've been using it non-stop ever since i worked from home been working from home since march of 2020 before when covet hit and right now i'm not sure when i'm going to be going back to the office maybe part time at some point here this summer who knows we're not really quite sure yet but starlink has been i guess a game changer for me on working from home teleworking teleconferences streaming things kids being able to stream uh classes if they have to stay home with classes and things it's been really great [Music] but before we get to the actual adjustment on the dish uh i want to talk about kind of the the the things that have happened over the last like almost four months now and first i want to talk a little about a little bit about the installation if you haven't been here before you haven't seen starling before installation is really really easy in my opinion compared to other things starlink sends everything in a box it's a kit uh they get the dish they send a little tripod mount and the dish has a hard-wired hundred foot power ethernet cable that runs from the dish to a poor block in the house so the job of the purchaser you put mount the dish anywhere you want outside wherever there is a spot to have clear covers to this the sky and then you've got to run that powered ethernet cable into the house next you plug in the power block in the house somewhere and then on the other end of the power block there's another ethernet port you plug the second ethernet cable into that port and then plug the other end of the ethernet cable into the router that is supplied after that you go log into your starlink app set up your wi-fi and you're good to go ready to go and then you can go and add in like i wired in a network switch and you can see my installation in this video here but i wired in a net network switch and then i have my work computer and my personal pc hooked up by le ethernet phones are all wi-fi of course and got laptops and tablets wi-fi uh but that's my installation the installation really is a breeze the hardest part is finding a permanent spot if you want it to be permanent in my case i put it on a roof on a on a pole mount they've got another roof mount that actually screws right to the roof surface and i think they'll probably have a couple other mounts as well i found the pole mount of the bet be best it gets a little bit above the roof because we have snow here in this case there's some winters there could be two to three four feet of snow in this particular location on the roof so i need to get it up a little bit so that uh the snow doesn't interfere with the dish there has been times where my dish that this network satellite dish had to be shoveled out a little bit so that's the basics of the install so dishy mcflatface is a phased array antenna i don't know the science behind it i have a basic understanding of what's working in there uh when you have a dish network or directv in uh connection for tv it's a single beam of whatever going up into the sky it locks onto a satellite that is stationary overground and sits in one place starlink does not work like that starlink uh the phaser antenna the way i understand it is there's many many many individual antennas in the face of the dish net if in the face of the dish and the starlight network as it starts to rain a little bit the starlink network is a a big big constellation of satellites that are constantly moving over our heads they're never in one spot over top of the earth they're always moving so with that this satellite actually it'll lock onto a satellite follow it across the sky and as it gets out of range another part of the antenna will look back and find the next satellite it may connect to one or two three satellites at one time i'm not really sure how that works but it is always moving the connection so that's why when you use the the app there's a there's a function on the app for your phone you can look here and see what the required open space for uh viewing to the sky kind of in our area to the north northwest that's important to have that opening so that when the satellite leaves your coverage area it can look back as far as it can to that that direction and lock onto the next satellite that's moving into your area so that's if you have any obstructions let's say if one tree comes up into the area or anything any obstructions that's why if you have issues with connection or other things like that that obstruction might be causing those issues because if it's in that way of that particular satellite moving overhead you're going to lose connection you won't be able to find another another satellite to hook up to so that's kind of the basics of the way the starlink works it's if you have a clear sp view to the sky it works awesome i haven't had any issues in my four months of obstructions in this particular setup here i've been really consistent there's been baited down times but that's due to software changes and things like that so let's talk about my experiences with the starlink internet connection i've been again i said i've been i was been working from home since march of 2020 through from march through december i was connected to the internet through frontier dsl typically five to six megabyte download speeds half a megabyte point megabit sorry five to six mega bit per second download speeds and a half to point eight uh megabit upload speeds very slow it was hard to do share you know sharing screens or anything like that upload speeds i've got typically work with big files so it took a long time to get things uploaded sometimes i'd have to go to the public library to get things uploaded and then we got starlink about december 15th of 2020 and i've used it non-stop for work ever since we have i've got multiple teleconferences per week uh typically uploading big data sets up to the internet to the cloud many times a week and it's been pretty much i wouldn't say flawless because the first i'd say up through february december to february mid february it would work really well and then it just happened to be like if i was middle of the teleconference all of a sudden there was some down time i think they're probably making a lot of big changes to the software within the satellites within the dishes who knows and it'd be middle of the day middle of my teleconference and all of a sudden it dropped down for two seconds five seconds and then reconnect drop out for five seconds reconnect and perhaps it was even maybe there was less connection to the satellites itself so up through february it was i kind of struggled there were some times where teleconferences i'd have i'd have to jump from my my wired starlink connection and i have to jump to my frontier dsl wi-fi i hung on the frontier for up until about two weeks ago but then in february end of february the connections got really really stable i could go a whole week without having connection issues during a teleconference or anything like that it was really really stable never really noticed anything there was one day a couple weeks ago i noticed it was like the full day it was really it was terrible for about three four hours in the morning but i probably think they're probably making software changes i don't i don't know i'm not connected and that's on that end because it's been really great since then uh it stabilized a ton i would have consistent connections maybe a minute or two of beta downtime if you look in the app a minute or two of downtime for a 12 hour period so that was been really really great and now we're in the march the last two what week two weeks have been awesome they made some software changes apparently and my speeds had almost doubled for the first maybe december through february early march i'd vary you know between 50 60 megabits per second download speed to 150 to 180 typically around 100 megabit download speeds i'm getting over 200 250 sometimes three 340 megabit download speeds megabit per second download speeds now with uploads in the 20 to 30 megabit per second range it's awesome it's you know i haven't really noticed a difference but seeing that is really nice i mean my kids can be watching disney plus or whatever you know streaming movies upstairs my wife can be doing something i can be working have a teleconference uploading a video to youtube and nobody really knows a difference and with frontier dsl hell like you couldn't do that you couldn't have two things going on at once especially uploading that would just kill that connection uh latency right now averaging between around 25 28 30 ish as a lower end up to 40 to 50 milliseconds uh i am oh perfectly okay with that my dsl connection was 18 to 20 uh but the 30 to 50 has been fine for me i'm not gaming hardcore or anything like that uh they do know that they want to get it down in the 18 to 25 range at some point i imagine once they get more ground stations set up and more satellites in the air the more maybe with the i think there's going to be some laser connections between the satellites that will make things better better latencies it hasn't been an issue for me okay so let's um let's get this uh starlink dishy mcflash face lowered a little bit right now i've got it unplugged in the basement and uh so i because if you have it plugged in and you're moving around it's gonna try and reorient itself a little bit so i'll get uh let's just set it up here move the camera a little bit and we'll get to work okay so i'm gonna cut my cut my tape i have on here of course it's starting to rain and i shouldn't be up here but it's still fine it's not downpouring it's just light sprinkle cut this tape and now i've got this pull these pull mounts up on here and i get my my tools out of my pocket the pull mount these are 7 16 bolts to hold them in there so i'm going to pull the big pole off make sure my little pole doesn't go sliding down the hill okay it can be kind of top heavy so be careful well i have this here reach down and i'm going to install my new pole [Music] all right that's done so i'm going to pull dishy off of the old fold 7 16 wrench okay all right so we'll set this guy under here so get this secured so it doesn't go anywhere okay i'm going to tighten my base down and really you want to want to get it kind of level you don't need to worry about like perfectly level because again this dish orients itself it's really slick that way so i'm going to tighten this guy up [Music] tighten the top bolt right now i'm just experimenting because i think we can get away with this though i actually haven't even checked the app but i assume as you add more satellites the better it'll be benefit of not cutting this original pose i can always put it back up to where it was so we'll tighten this guy down get him finger tight for now i don't think you need too much because they're kind of [Music] they've got little points in them so they dig into the pole we don't want to strip them out either so this this this pole metal pole here in this mount that i have i got it from lowe's it's their s bk structural steel i just go to little's website and search for structural steel pipe and this is the inch and quarter steel pipe and actually the inner diameter of the inch and a quarter steel pipe is really perfect for this connection right here for the dishing part if you you i you really could really bypass the pole mount which is this part and just stick the dish into the metal pipe but i didn't i got the pull mount so i'm going to use it [Music] so run the wire in i'm gonna tell my wife to go plug it in all right so my wife plugged in the dish so hopefully here it starts connecting and we'll start looking for satellites while we're at that i'm going to tape the wire down get some tape in my pocket and hopefully we can see this baby move a little bit because it's going to have to reconnect although it is really close to where it was i'm guessing it'll have to move a little bit and it really doesn't matter the orientate orientation of the dish it'll the mechanisms the motors can move anyway around the pole pretty nifty device [Music] i'm using the check for obstructions and at this elevation the only only thing is right over here there's a little tree it's kind of just on the bottom here of it and it's the circle moves around enough those trees are fine [Music] so i don't know if we'll have too many issues with it being this low before of course it's going to get a little more above that tree [Music] all right it says it's online and has a good connection and obviously it didn't even move so take a look here i don't know if you can see the app or not and it's connected so we'll run it like this for a couple days and uh see how how stable the connection is that's the only way we can experiment to see really i mean you can you can guess based on what the app says but how accurate is that too with your every cell phone is different so we'll see how it works i don't know if they even moved at all it might have and we'll go from there the dish material is it's actually smooth i'm not gonna stick my hand on it right now because it's receiving the internet the water kind of beads up on it as it rains as you can see then here's my it's actually making noise there's my pole connection just goes in the roof mount on the ground a little flange a little t there and it sticks up maybe three or four feet above my roof peak let's talk about some tips and tricks with some start with starlink uh there's not many uh it's pretty much self sustainable but mics i use it every day of course every every workday monday through friday and then the kids use it on the weekend and i have experience using a daily like that that i've had to require i've had to restart it by restarting i mean go and unplug the power block for a couple minutes five three four five minutes and then plug it back in i'd have to do a power cycle at least once a week maybe twice a week it's it's not too often and i think what's happening is there's software updates that possibly uh need to be re-engaged when you do a hard power cycle like that kind of like restarting a computer almost i've found that that has really improved uh my my my experience overall number two utilize the app on your phone the starlight app uh the starlink app there's tons of stuff in the app there's the statistics and actually the statistics is also available if you didn't know it on your a pc that's connected you can connect it's into the statistics of the starlink um system by dialing one at the like on a web or a browser you can do 192.168.100.1 and that'll take you to the statistics of the connection of starlink and that has i i usually like to use that for uh if i'm in a meeting and i i can sense uh instability i'll have the statistics open and kind of keep an eye on what's going on so if i know i've got an outage or not uh other in the app also there's uh you can use a check for obstructions tool to kind of see look towards the sky and see if you have are obstructed at all uh there's facts faqs you can contact support with the app so it's good to have it now the key thing is you can have the app but the really to be able to connect in the starlight system using the app i think i've had troubles uh if the starlight router is not in in the system if you're using an aftermarket router it sometimes might not be able to get connected so what i have is i've got the starlink router in my basement and then i've got everything else coming out of that um number three and i'll show this a little bit later is uh there's some websites out there that kind of track the location of the satellites and one of them is https uh satellite map space that's the website and that helps you can see where all the ground stations are at uh you can see where all the satellites are i'd see we see where the satellite trains are at and it's pretty cool to see that and see how things are flowing and it's been noticeable in the last three four months how many more satellites are actually up there and of course they're launching all the time so it's it's uh it's kind of cool to see and i can really tell that the united states is kind of more engulfed in green circles now with that coverage uh some problems that we've had we hadn't didn't have too many heavy snow storms this last winter we had one one day it snowed really really heavily for about an hour and during that hour i had consistent connection issues and even with the hard restarts you know unplugging it plugging back in the connection would drop out and i actually went up on the roof even though there was 16 inches of snow on the roof i went up there and just double checked this the dish and the dish was completely clean it was the interference between the dish and the satellites that were there causing issues you know heavy snowfall in the atmosphere big cloud banks in the atmosphere caused the connection issues that was i was having and that was just one day the whole winter that i had those issues with that heavy snowstorm sometimes you can get a rainstorm coming through you can see on the app or the statistics the connection isn't as stable but you don't really lose speed too much a heavier snowstorm you can lose a little bit of speed but you still have compared to my dsl the speed is awesome so that's uh some of the issues with the weather i you know i i'd imagine if we get one of those really big heavy thunderstorms you know we lose connection with like this network tv when a big thunderstorm is rolling and you get this really tall cloud banks uh with all those connection uh but i demand so i'd imagine that'll be very similar with starlink you know we get a big heavy thunderstorm in the middle of summer we'll probably lose connection for a little bit we can live with that we don't need satellite internet all the time another another issues that we had early on you know for the first two months and i mentioned this when i was on the roof where there was quite a few down times that would occur like during my teleconferences and things in my meetings i was more prevalent in the first two to three months of my of having starlink installed and i'd imagine for people that are as as the service moves south into the united states or wherever else in the world i'd imagine that you might encounter those down times you know satellites might the satellite coverage might not be as dense as it is here now you know because here the satellites are kind of growing right over top of wisconsin and then the northern part of the united states and southern canada when they're kind of the orbits kind of naturally all can congregate right over top of this area so that brings up that satellite density is much greater up here compared to you know maybe florida or texas or something like that so i'd imagine if as as beta coverage starts moving south those uh uh there may be intermittent outages because of the satellite coverage isn't as dense as it once as it will be at some point but for us the downtime was it was it was more prevalent in the first two to three months because of i'd imagine software updates and changes and things like that so they were always constantly resetting probably i imagine restarting the software and things like that uh so that's pretty much it for tips and tricks and problems um uh we'll go inside here a little while tomorrow probably and uh do some screen caps of some speed tests that we've run and kind of look at the past my history of speed tests on my computer through using the speed test app uh from december up until today you can really see a difference in the fluctuation of what the speed tests are and then the increase that i've gotten in the last two weeks too so stick around okay let's check out uh what's available for speed testing and kind of viewing the starlink system and then also check out the statistics that's available on a computer so this website here satellitemap.space is a useful tool to kind of see can you give you an idea what uh the starlight system looks like we can see here over the united states the satellites are constantly moving the green circles are theoretical uh areas that each satellite can serve so 7af here moving across is highlighted by this green circle here and you can see now here's the satellite train coming across southern south of alaska that's recently launched satellites that are moving around and will soon start dispersing out into a more uh organized orbit you can see some of them are up ahead here on the same path these yellow ones here um this is a pretty cool tool just to be able to see what's going on i do know they have some uh satellites that are going over on a polar orbit at the moment they must not be actually going over the poles at this time but they're there are polar orbited satellites too another tool that you can access is the statistics this is available on the app for starlink and then also here it is you can access it through a web browser to access it through a web browser 192.168.100.1 and that's if that ip address is available in the uh the faq for starlink you can see here this is my current statistics as of today uh this is after lowering the starlink on the roof mount to the little shorter version uh overall the last 24 hours i've had two minutes of downtime which is not bad at all pink success is pretty average uh average latency download usage this is what's currently being used you can see i did a speed test about five minutes ago down and up and of course latency increases as you upload and then here's the satellite connection quality i guess they call it so let's look at some speed tests um i do speed tests quite often 20 to 30 a month i think so i've been kind of keeping track but we can do a live one right now one thing to know about with starlink is right now the location services are kind of messed up a little bit i must have a lower connection right now so i just did one it was 200 some mega megabits per second um right now as you can see it's it's it's going to a chicago server uh and when you go and log on let's say to home depot or menards or any website that that uses location services um it'll usually put me for instance down in chicago it'll say access the chicago store or for instance or something like that it's kind of annoying i know i contacted their support on it and they said that they're working on that issue but it's just kind of something you got to deal with so every time you're going shopping or going on a website that has a physical store you got to make sure you update your zip code in there so that it's going to a relevant store i'll do another one here just something to be aware of and you know my ping here is a little a little bit higher today uh but it you know i may or may not have other computers uploading things at this time so it varies between 20 to 30. say we're jumping about jumping up a little bit higher now after the speed test we'll look at my history of speed tests and how things have changed over the last four months since i've been using it all right so using the speed test app you can actually go and download there's past speed tests you can look at the history here's my history of speed tests that i've done and if i go in look in my excel file we can see here's my speed test that i've done with starlink since i got it running uh december 17th of 2020. for the most part it's been pretty static between the 170 150 and the actually it was a little higher first and it looks like it dropped kind of average for a while and now it's slowly picking back up and this is you can really see this in the actual numbers you can see here on the download side since about march 24th even before that a little bit we've had some pretty high speeds here's a 314 a 306 329 and a lot of 200's for standard download on the upper ones the this the pings latencies are a little bit higher uh and then some other ones other ones are lower and you know i can't guarantee this we don't have this isn't the only pc that's connected i have a weather station that's always uploading too so that might affect latency a little bit uh upload speeds are nice as well here's a 31 here's a 29 you know some nines i mean they vary quite a bit but you can really tell that you know there must have been a software change between december and january and then it got a little bit lower speeds here from middle of january to middle of february and some upper spots here early march and then a little lower slowed down for me for a little bit and then it just dramatically increased here the last two weeks as far as overall max speed goes as i discussed earlier it's very important to have that clear space available to minimize any obstructions and make sure you have the best connection possible and seeing the the live starlink map you can really tell that you know how things are moving over top of us and here's actually an open spot for me right now see if there i don't know if this one aw is active or not so based on my most recent speed test results and my testing and i've been this is i've been using it uh for now a couple days with the lowered satellite dish i think i'm probably end up keeping it at this point but we'll see as time time goes on we'll see if i notice any issues with the uh satellite dish a little bit lower on my roof i don't have any connection issues um it says it's not obstructed and you can see that in the start in the startling statistics as well there it is and you can see it's the pink success is really good and there's no downtime in the last 24 hours so i think at this point i'm going to end up keeping the star link at the lower level uh but it we may have adjusted in the future too all right as i stand out here on this gorgeous day in the wood yard i'm gonna end this video here i kept it clear and concise not really it's probably one of the longer videos i've had since the rv remodel video so i'm gonna make this conclusion fast uh if you like this video give it a like maybe subscribe to my channel uh thumbs up all the fun stuff leave a comment what do you think do you have starlink how is it doing for you i'd like to hear those comments from you so let me know and we'll catch you in the next one thanks [Music] you

Channel: Outdoors Engineer

Views: 213,294

Keywords: starlink review, starlink satellites in the sky, Starlink, SpaceX, Satellite Internet, starlink pole mount kit, starlink pole mount adapter, starlink pole mount diameter, starlink installation, starlink install instructions, starlink installation roof, starlink roof mount, starlink roof install, starlink roof mount options, starlink speed test, starlink speed test results, starlink latency test, starlink latency and speed, starlink internet, spacex starlink

Id: RtJlYW-Lqmw

Length: 34min 58sec (2098 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021