Starlink on overland rack: Old vs New Style?

[oguruma]

I am looking to mount a Starlink transceiver on my overland rack. Ideally, I'll park somewhere with a decent view of the sky, and just leave the dish mounted to the truck. I already have existing external WiFi antennas mounted on the truck, so I can afford to be a pretty good distance from the truck and still get WiFi signal.

Starlink recently released a new flat dish. That seems like a perfectly logical choice, but the downside is that it doesn't move to better connect with the satellites.

I'm thinking another option might be to mount the old style Starlink dish to the rack with some kind of bracket that will let me tilt it down/flat. I could stow it (tilt it so it's parallel to the bed) when I'm moving, and then erect it when I'm stationary.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

 

[Pntyrmvr]

Musk let it out that a portable unit was in the cards for later in 2024.

 

[WanderingBison]

I am looking to mount a Starlink transceiver on my overland rack. Ideally, I'll park somewhere with a decent view of the sky, and just leave the dish mounted to the truck. I already have existing external WiFi antennas mounted on the truck, so I can afford to be a pretty good distance from the truck and still get WiFi signal.

Starlink recently released a new flat dish. That seems like a perfectly logical choice, but the downside is that it doesn't move to better connect with the satellites.

I'm thinking another option might be to mount the old style Starlink dish to the rack with some kind of bracket that will let me tilt it down/flat. I could stow it (tilt it so it's parallel to the bed) when I'm moving, and then erect it when I'm stationary.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

I don’t have any experience with the new dish, but as far as moving to align, it’s designed to be at a fixed angle and for the user to turn it in the correct orientation.

My experience with my previous generation regular dish nearly flat mounted at about the same angle inside a box on the roof is that the orientation of the dish/truck makes only a slight difference in performance, wether stationary or in-motion.

I wouldn’t worry about the absence of alignment motors!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Howard70]

A couple of observations:

1. The 2nd generation (articulated rectangular dish) is designed for winds up to 50 mph. Ours packed up in January after some very windy nights in southern Arizona (antenna mounted on roof rack while camped). The culprit was the articulating motors being fouled by the winds. The 3rd generation (non articulating rectangular dish) is apparently designed for higher winds (but I don't recall the specs at this time). Starlink replaced our out of warranty 2nd generation unit in 5 days at no charge to us. I thought of asking if I could get the 3rd generation unit until I discovered that -

2. The 3rd generation unit requires about 25% more power than the 2nd generation, plus the antenna and the modem are both considerably larger.

Based on #2 we opted to stay with the 2nd generation for the power savings and the smaller foot print for packing.

Howard Snell

 

[Alloy]

7 of of 10 times our dish ends 40' up on a mast or 100' away to clear trees or some other object.

 

[Pacific Northwest yetti]

I have V3, but am not using it with a 12v yet. Its flat mounted to the top of my 5er. No issues, the app shows a “ tilt to 21 degrees” message. But I have not had any speed issues, streaming, Chromecast, Vid and teleconference and VPN for work.

I used

https://www.trioflatmount.com/