Starlink Setup and Review

this week I did a DIY install of Elon musk's styling satellite Broadband in today's video I'm going to show you why I installed this system the problems I encountered along the way what's great about it the things I think they could do a lot to improve [Applause] why change provider in the first place well because I live in a rural location private premises just doesn't exist out here all the existing providers are limited by that pesky copper line that goes from the telegraph pole into the house so over the years I've gone from Sky to BT plus net more recently air band that you can see up there which is fine for downloads but hopeless for uploading my YouTube videos and my current system this 5G ee Broadband over cellular system where the router sat on my windowsill line of sight to the Mast on the hill it's been faultless for a year but for the last two months the whole system has been terrible why I don't know maybe trees have grown up around the Mast but one thing is for sure you never get an honest answer when you phone them up to find out what's going on end result of that I've had Google Docs timing out so I couldn't work on scripts for each vid I've had no TV streaming we've had no Wi-fi so everyone's been maxing out on data we've had to pay extra for this and most annoyingly the video I uploaded last weekend had a glitch 50 seconds in why starlink well I've been considering it for ages but was worried about mixed reports on the upload speeds this being particularly important for my YouTube video uploads but the kit should be 460 quid reduced to 99 pounds at the moment in rural locations like mine it was too tempting enough to turn down even with the worry about those upload speeds 20 quid for Postage and Packaging gives me the total invoice at this point of 119 quid with the pressure from the family to get the Internet fixed I was desperate so I ordered the kit on the 19th of May and it arrived three to four days later so this is what arrives in the post and packaging on the top nothing in there and then you've got a stand it's a very basic instructions 15 meters of satellite cable a power cable and this modem initial thoughts the dish was a bit grubby covered in a thin layer of dust surface coating of the dish is a bit odd and it has that whether you can see that they'll blemish on it bigger issues than this were concerning me you've got a socket for the satellite and power cables but not one ethernet socket which you normally expect somewhere on your router now I just assume the modem would come with an ethernet port and in fact the first generation did but Elon in His Infinite Wisdom decided to ditch it on this new second generation system but this is an issue for me because in the thick brick walled Cottage that I live in I couldn't rely on connectivity from the modem alone and several years ago I installed a unify wireless access point system I've got two access points in the house and one in the shed and in the garage currently connected to the modem slightly chaotically via this network switch to power all the devices on our Network luckily you can buy an ethernet adapter but it's annoying you have to pay extra for this stand being the only mounting accessory that comes with the dish was also giving me a few headaches now this is all well and good if you've got uninterrupted Sky somewhere convenient to place it around your garden or maybe on a flat rooftop but how many of us are in that situation so I had to think creatively about how I was going to fix this onto the roof of my Cottage and pretty much the only suitable place I could find was on the edge of this chimney which probably needs planning as the ever eagle-eyed Sam pointed out on my Discord chat Forum this week and having made that decision the 15 meters or 50 foot of satellite cable that comes in this bundle was starting to look a bit short and if I'd known there was a shop on the website I might have found a couple of things to help me with my intended setup but the shop is pretty well hidden I don't think you can even see it until you've logged in and even if I had the flashing and pivot roof mounting kits wouldn't have worked with my Rosemary style clay tiles nor for that matter with the long or short wall mounts but the ethernet adapter would have saved me 15 pounds on the version I bought from Amazon and the pipe adapter would also have come in handy I might have been able to find somewhere in the garden to wrap the ground pole mount but that would have meant purchasing 150 foot replacement cable which would have cost more than the entire kit and then you have the issue of somehow burying the cable run but at least now you know there is a shop and my advice to you unlike me make sure you include everything you think you're going to need when you buy the dish so oblivious to the existence for starlink shop but determined to come up with my own DIY styling chimney Mount I set off now to my local agricultural DIY store to see if they had anything that I might be able to use James who runs the metal shop and the inspiration behind my folding workbench found this one and a half meter section of galvanized pipe I also picked up these M10 25 millimeter long hex bolts I then went onto Amazon and bought the starlink ethernet adapter a roll of self amalgamating tape a drill and Taps bit set and a box of six pipe bracket clamps and with all these extra parts for the chimney Mount I'd now spent a grand total of 245 pounds 90. still a lot less than the 460 quid it should have cost but the problems weren't over yet because I still had to work out how to safely install my new kit I bought this ladder roof hook kit years ago I haven't never used it I decided to give it a go bolting it to a section of one of my ladders but this was a non-starter because the ladder just wasn't long enough it was too dangerous to access this chimney with ladders alone two years ago when I was replacing a broken chimney pot and nothing's changed so why don't I ever learn I decided it was much safer to put a tower up for more details on how and where to hide towels from check out my video a link to which is coming up on screen now we bought this towel for our business about 10 years ago and it's been brilliant for all men of outdoor jobs like this bomb line whereas you feel very vulnerable at the top of a ladder when you're working off a tower if properly supported and tethered you feel much safer and the ladder hook install didn't gain a waste as I still use this to access the chimney from the tower platform I've got to say that even with the protection of this Tower this is dangerous work it's something I'm used to doing having done a lot of work on the roof and chimneys in the past but a lot of people say I should have had enhanced protection I should have perhaps been wearing a harness working up at this height so my point to you today is if you're too worried about taking on something like this don't do it leave it to the professionals because your safety is of Paramount importance now the eagle-eyed amongst you'll be seeing okay but what about that tree right next to the install location but you get up to the location where the satellite is going to be installed and you can see that the Treetop sort of Peaks only just slightly above the Satellite Dish as part of the setup process on the app you have an opportunity to check the potential install location for instructions and yes a bit of the tree does feature in the test as you can see but the app confirmed this was a great location and in fact a few days on the app has confirmed again that the dish has an unobstructed view of the sky so on with that knowledge it's full steam ahead with the install the dish has this slot designed into the neck basically so you can unplug the cable which is worth knowing as with the cable pre-installed I've got to say I didn't realize you can pull it out and it's important to know this as only this end of the cable can be properly threaded through a wall during the install as the other end has this right angled design but anyway the plan was to slot the base or neck of the dish into the galvanized pole and use those two M10 bolts I bought to conveniently screw into that slot but gently because I don't know what tech if any is in the base of that Mast with the dish masked about 33 mil in diameter and the inside of the galvanized pole around 36 the dish would be a bit loose in the pipe so that was where the self amalgamating tape came in to cushion or fill that Gap now I've always had a cunning way to enable bolts to self-tap themselves into whatever it is just screwing into and that is to use a drill bit that's a half a millimeter narrower than the diameter of the bolt and I've done this in the past for soft Furnishings where your self-tapping screws into steel beams stuff like that to link to the video coming up on screen now it's a really useful technique when you're hanging heavy soft Furnishings but anyway I had a much more cunning idea today and that was to properly drill and tap a thread into the galvanized pipe something I hadn't done before so after marking the center line on the pole and making an indent for the drill holes with a punch I began by drilling a pilot hole actually the metal is pretty soft but it will stop the wider drill bit wandering and then I attached the M10 drill and tap bit to my impact driver and gently drilled and then tapped two threaded holes into the galvanized pipe I'm so pleased with this bit set it was effortless tapping the thread into the pipe and my new pipe adaptation was now complete we were getting there but there was one headache still to overcome how to attach the pole to the chimney TV aerial installers out there will probably point me to the proper attachments for this job but I needed a solution that could accommodate my 36 millimeter or one and a half inch diameter pipe and fast so I bought this box of six pipe clamps on Amazon and figured it should do the job a crucial tool for this was my SDS drill is the hardness of the bricks made drilling left-handed which I was doing for safety sick with my Combi very difficult I marked the three screw holes on each base plate using my Marksman hole marking tool fast becoming one of the favorite Tools in my collection as are my outsole work gloves which if you watch my vids regularly you'll know I've been wearing for some time now I'm proud to say as of this month I'm now a brand ambassador and I'll include a link to the gloves in the description below the vid I then drilled a seven millimeter diameter hole for these Brown plugs I checked the vertical alignment of each clamp with a spirit level and then fixed each clamp to the chimney with these 4.5 by 50 millimeter exterior tight outdoor screws again using my impact driver as less pressure is required to drive home screws with this the good thing when working at this height and then it was time to clamp the galvanized pipe in place I've got to say certainly for the initial fix the bolts were only just long enough to bite into the clamp base I really like the fact that they come with hex bolts which made tightening them with my drill driver and manual screwdriver really easy arganized for quite well as how I was going to get the cable from that dish into the house as 50 foot isn't a lot to play with and didn't leave me with a lot of options I tried to fit it down the disused chimney that leads directly into my cellar but there's a blockage somewhere in the pot in the chimney so my only option was to take it down the outside of the chimney and I know the paintwork is shocking but it'll be transformed this summer using that Emperor paint that I've used on the south side of the cottage around the outside of the house and through the frame of the salad door which I drilled with a 20 millimeter auger bit remember you have to plan your cable run in reverse because the plug that goes into the Mast on the bottom of the dish has to start in the house as you this is the only end of the cable that you can throw through that wall this is basically how much cable I've got left but with a cable run now finally sorted I could reconnect it to the satellite dish Mast and fix the mast in position gently tightening those bolts and all that remained was a simple task of running through the steps outlined in the app to register power up the system and wait for the dish to configure itself and there's a video to assist you with this with install instructions on the starlink support page the power cable goes into the bottom of the router note that led shows his power along with the new ethernet adapter I bought then the cable from the dish goes into the ethernet adapter and an ethernet cable connected my adapter to my household network via that network switch I showed you earlier so that starlink install vid I just showed you explains that in the northern hemisphere the dish will point to the north so I painstakingly turned my galvanized all around thinking that the dish could only pivot so far but on powering it up what did I find not only can that clever little dish pivot itself vertically but it can also spin on its axis to find the optimum configuration of the sky so guess what I'm saying here is it doesn't really matter how you orientate the pole before you pad the whole thing up now that we've been up and running for over a week how have I found the new Broadband provided by starlink well before we dive into any testing I can categorically say that this system has solved all the internet connectivity issues we had in a heartbeat no longer my booted offline whilst working the TV hasn't buffered once since we've been watching streaming services like Netflix Apple TV BBC iPlayer and our Google home hub has stayed connected family complaints have ceased in short we're a happy house but what about the download and there's all important upload speeds now this is a little tricky for me to test properly because I've always known that my unify home network loses a lot of the download and upload speed which is being reported by the router itself I don't know whether this is the way I've wired it up and I know that there are more Superior systems out there like for example Aruba but anyway when I run the speed test whilst connected directly to the router over Wi-Fi it's showing a pretty impressive 191 megabits per second down and 28 up which is similar to starling's own speed test which you can run through the app which also reported latency at 33 milliseconds anything under 50 being good latency by the way measures the time it takes to send data and receive a response so what this tells me as I just said is I probably need to upgrade my unify home network I delved a Little Deeper by running a six hour test on test my net which checks speeds every 30 minutes I ran these tests on my PC which has a hardwired ethernet connection directly to the router the download speeds range from 30 and 93 with a median of 86 and the upload speeds from 3 and 11 with a rather unsatisfactory median of six remember my worries about upload speeds before I signed up to do a real life test I uploaded last week's YouTube video again yesterday and it took about two hours to upload which is a lot longer than my 5G ee router used to which you would have probably done that in about 40 minutes so clearly this isn't very fast but at least it has uploaded and the airband system I mentioned at the start of this video just wouldn't upload anything it would sort of time out after a couple of hours and if you're watching this video now completely glitch free you'll know that I've successfully uploaded it through starlink on latency I also ran a few further tests again the results weren't particularly impressive although I understand it's normal to have 200 milliseconds for requests across the world whereas you can see latency for UK based requests was a much better 55 milliseconds more similar to starlink's own reported 33 and from a practical point of view using this every day requesting web pages it's really quick so I haven't got any real issues on the latency front so that's it for today I hope you found this video useful and if you are thinking of installing styling yourselves it's answered all the questions you had let's continue this the discussion in the comments section below this is after all the most satisfying thing for me about running this Channel and I'll put links to everything I've talked about today in the description below the vid which of course you can access on your smartphone by clicking on the more button and on your PC by clicking on the show more link finally if you're new to my channel I would absolutely love to have you subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here and don't forget to click the notification icon so you get notified of all my future uploads thanks for watching today and I'll see you soon

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 255,107

Keywords: starlink setup, starlink internet, starlink review, satellite internet, starlink speed test, spacex starlink, starlink unboxing, starlink satellite internet, starlink speed test 2023, starlink setup 2023, starlink setup ethernet, starlink setup uk, STARLINK INSTALL AND REVIEW, ansell hyflex 11-840, ansell hyflex 11-561, ansell work gloves

Id: S3WPYHhITE0

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023