Starlink

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Starlink is a popular options for nomads who want fast internet access even when boondocking far from civilization. Starlink is the satellite internet service offered by Space-X, and offers a tier of service specifically for RVs. $150/mo and a $600 receiver (or $2,500 for an in-motion receiver) gets you extremely fast internet in most places in the country (Worldwide roaming is available for $200/mo). Although when on the RV/Roaming plan, your traffic is de-prioritized over users who have a fixed address in the area and you may experience slower speeds. This is more of a problem east of the Mississippi River.

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The catch is that Starlink works best in remote areas and often doesn't work at all in cities. In the western United States this is usually not a problem, but east of the Mississippi river there is usually too much population density for the service to be usable. See the Starlink coverage map. This is a good solution for boondockers who set up camp in the wilderness, but it doesn't offer much usability for urban dwellers. The general rule is that if you have a cell phone signal, you're not remote enough to use Starlink and should stick to Cellular options as they'll probably be faster/more reliable.

The receiver((who's official name is "Dishy McFlatface")) is also fairly large (about the size of a pizza box) and takes a lot of power (50-100w continuous draw). The less expensive receiver isn't designed for the sort of vibration and forces imparted when driving, so the majority of Starlink users keep the dish inside the van with them and only deploy it when they're stopped somewhere for an extended period of time. See one user's experience here. The in-motion receiver is designed to mounted to the roof of vehicles and be operable while moving, but for most van dwellers the costs is not worth it.

Another downside is that to work, the receiver needs a completely unobstructed view of the entire sky. A single small tree somewhere in field of view is sometimes enough to make the connection drop out every few minutes, so sometimes having the portable (non-vehicle-mounted) dish is preferable. You can park in the shade, and run the dish out into a clearing (it's weatherproof).

The Starlink dish is powered from the included router, which runs off of AC wall power. Unfortunately the transformer is integrated into the router itself, so using the router will require use of an inverter and the associated efficiency loss.

Running Starlink off of 12v is slightly challenging and will require providing your own router (see below for good Peplink and Cradlepoint options, but cheap consumer routers work fine for most people). You'll need to inject power into the cable going to Dishy, but it has proprietary connections, uses a non-standard Ethernet wiring and non-standard PoE (Power Over Ethernet). Various options are available depending on skill level, this video being a good start. Also see this article for less-destructive methods of powering Starlink directly from 12v.

People who have successfully powered Dishy directly off of 12v DC using a have reported [power savings of ~30%].

These 4 images are tagged with Starlink:

Web site
Visit Starlink on the web.
Search Amazon
Search Amazon for related products.
Wikipedia article
See Starlink on Wikipedia.
Starlink for RVers and other mobile users
Public Facebook group with 113k members as of August 2024. "Discussion on STARLINK for mobile users. NOT affiliated in any way with Starlink or SpaceX."

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