Starlink - 5 Things I've Learned After 2 Weeks of SpaceX Service

[Music] so [Music] what's up warp community welcome to warp news this is rich spooler and today i've got another starling satellite internet video for you it's been about two weeks since i got my kit and set it up and if you missed that video where i did the unboxing setup and review of the starling system you can check that out right here and in those two weeks i've learned a lot i've tested some things i've even made some changes and today i'm going to go through the five things that i think are most important for you to get the most and the best out of your starlink satellite internet coming up now on warp news [Music] all right so number one first foremost and by far the most important is satellite placement if you don't have a good spot for your satellite dish it's just going to give you a lot of headaches and a lot of frustrations so picking out the ideal spot for your satellite dish is absolutely number one in my first video that i recorded you might remember that i originally was going to place it on my roof right here above my front porch well after install and some testing for a few hours it turned out that was not the best spot because these trees in front of my house even though i thought they were far enough away they weren't i was getting some obstructions the dish in its current state remember it is still in beta is very very picky as far as tree branches and things like that so what i did was decide to climb up on my roof a little bit higher i put it way up there on the ridgeline i originally thought that that extra 20 30 feet was not going to make a big difference why was i wrong it made a huge difference my internet signal is strong 90 of the time at least i get a very very solid signal very fast speeds so definitely pick a perfect spot for your dish so number two on my list goes very closely hand in hand with number one and that is the proper use of the check for obstructions tool on the starlink app and i'm gonna turn that on right now and just show you what i'm talking about so i'm standing right now where i had originally placed my satellite dish you can see the black horizon line you can see the blue sky and what i had thought was as long as you had a decent amount of blue sky as you panned around that you were in good shape i was not correct about that what you want to do is find the black horizon line and pan around it and if you see anything that's bad so there are trees here lots of them this point of view that the satellite takes is basically the entire scope that your satellite may turn at any given point in time so even though i appear to be good here i'm not good here i'm okay around here and i'm really not good here and that's where i was getting a lot of my outages so proper use of the obstruction tool is critical now when i climbed up on the roof a little bit higher if you do so please take safety precautions and make sure that that is your first priority or hire a professional but when i climbed to the top of my roof and then used the obstruction finder from that elevation i had absolutely no obstructions at all clear blue sky in whatever direction the satellite may need to point at any point in time and that has made a tremendous difference in the quality and consistency of my connection number three on my list is to get a good understanding of the starlink app particularly the settings and the statistics now the settings i don't use too often but when you're first setting up your system you want to come down here into the settings and you see starlink actions you have reboot and you have stow stow is really important if you're going to move your satellite whether you're going to try a different placement or whatever you always want to make sure that you stow it first because it resets it down into its shipped state so that there is very little risk of you damaging it you don't want to move the satellite while it's on while it's taking a signal and while it's in a certain position that it's not in in its original state if you do have some issues with your signal when you first set it up i have found that rebooting it once or twice kind of helps things along it kind of resets it uh gives it a little bit of a jump start if you will in my experience so rebooting can also be helpful if you're having connection problems but the really valuable screen is up here at the top right corner you see this little icon that looks like a graph and when you tap that it's going to show your statistics ping success latency download and upload usage snr i'm not entirely sure what that means yet but the one i look at the most is the ping success and you'll see that there's three different color codes there's obstructed there's no satellites and there's other outages now you can save yourself a lot of headaches by only focusing on what you can actually control and that's the obstructed color i'm going to show you some screenshots of what my obstructed color looked like before i moved the satellite dish into its current and most ideal position so you can see in this one here and this was the first day or two that i had set it up and it was in a place that is not in right now i was having six minutes of obstructed time in about a three hour window here now that may not sound like a lot but it is um and that is happening at the time because of the trees that were in the way that i showed you earlier in step two of this video and here's another screenshot that shows you a different point in time and as you can see i still have obstructions this is over a four hour period i have six minutes of obstructions and i have two minutes of no satellites now no satellites is not something that we can control what i have found is that if you live in an area like i do where starlink just became available within the last couple of weeks understand that they're still launching satellites you don't have a large constellation of satellites for your dish to fix on quite yet that day is going to come in the very near future but these two minutes represents the amount of time it takes for your satellite to find a new signal and physically readjust if you catch this at the right time you can actually see your satellite dish move and realign it's a pretty cool thing to watch but no satellites isn't something that you can control it just is what it is right now but obstructions that's something that you can do something about which makes this part of the app very valuable the fourth thing that i really strongly recommend is to get yourself a wi-fi range extender now what i use is the google nest wi-fi and as you can see i have the aux port plugged directly into the cyber truck router and this really makes a big big difference for me i have a three puck system i've got this one here of course i've got one way out in the kitchen on the other side of the house and then one upstairs and having this mesh network uh that extends your wi-fi signal really makes a big big difference i found honestly in my experience over the last couple weeks the cyber truck router itself it's okay it's not great it's not terrible it's kind of mediocre i would give it hopefully in the future with a software update they can make it a little bit more powerful as far as range goes but having a system like this really makes a huge huge difference in your various devices being able to pick up a good good strong signal from your dish i have seen some people ask around the internet how well starlink works with a wi-fi extender i can say from my experience it works great you just use that aux port on the back of the cyber truck router plug it into your device in my case it is the google nest wi-fi and as you can see i'll hit my wi-fi button here it ports everything right in you've got all your devices you can run your speed tests everything works great you can see here i've got a pretty good history of speed tests all well over 100 with a few exceptions there was an outage there when i ran a speed test during a satellite change i got zero on the download somehow 30 on the upload i don't really understand that but you can see the vast majority of these very very good speeds especially if you're someone like me coming from a previous internet service that was extraordinarily slow so does it work with a third-party wi-fi extender absolutely and it actually works really well so the last tip that i wanted to share with you today is to remember that starlink is still in beta especially if you live somewhere like me where it just became available in the last few weeks or months maybe satellites are still being launched all the time and with each launch your connection is just going to get better and better the non-controllable outages that i talked about like no satellite and other outages whatever that is they're going to get less and less frequent and ultimately i'm pretty confident are just going to go away entirely now being a beta tester by definition means that you're testing a service that's not yet live your job as a beta tester is to find bugs and report issues and just generally help the developers make the product better for when it does go into full live production and that is where the starlink system is at today if you have a dish you're a beta tester now that being said if 100 uptime and flawless uninterrupted service is absolutely critical to you for your career for school or whatever your life situation may be today might not be the day for you to dive into starlink because there are going to be periods of outages albeit very brief i'm talking for me a matter of seconds but that is enough to interrupt say a zoom call or disconnect you from a vpn so just bear those things in mind as you decide if this is right for you and if this is the right time for you but if you're like me and your internet options are are pretty bad uh maybe you live in a rural or somewhere place it's a total game changer the speeds are lightning fast the uptime is acceptable to me again very very minor outages from time to time just a couple seconds here and there but the service that you get when it's up is absolutely fantastic so make sure you keep up with starlink news over the coming months and the remainder of this year as it is expected to go fully live sometime in 2021 maybe early 2022 depending on you know factors but keep up with it it's gonna keep getting better and better i can't wait for you all to try it and you can follow all the starlink news as it becomes available on warpnews.org so make sure to give this video a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and check us out on warpnews.org where we bring you the best on fact-based optimistic news from all over the world thanks for watching this video today and i will see you next time with more from warp news

Channel: Warp Institute

Views: 179,999

Keywords:

Id: p4-3UT1i2k4

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021