:thumbsup: Appreciate the useful link. Unfortunately it assumes customers own a smartphone to run the "app". Believe it or not there are still a few rural folks on this planet who aren't smartphone owners.
Especially if you can't get cell reception. We used to have to walk up to the end of the drive, to get really crappy reception.
I still have the good old fashioned flip phone which goes along with our poor cell phone reception.
You don't need a cell signal or a WiFi connection to use the app in "Check for Obstructions" mode. (I just put my phone in "Airplane mode", which shuts off all those connections, and the obstruction check still works. I believe (but have not verified) the app needs to have some idea of where you are, but if you have a view of the sky, the GPS in the phone will correctly locate you, even without a cell or WiFi signal. IF your sky is so obstructed that you can't get a GPS signal, odds are that Starlink is not going to work for you.
If you don't own a smart phone, you have a couple of options:
- Ask a friend with a smartphone to download the app and come over to spend a few minutes helping you find a location
- Eyeball the location. More sky visibility is better than none. If you want to do better than just an eyeball look, bring out a protractor or anyting that can measure angles. From Starlink's FAQs: "In early service, the required clear field of view is a 100-degree cone around the center of the dish (after tilting)". That's 50˚ on all sides around the center of where the dish chooses to aim itself. In my part of the country, Starlink dishes tilt about 15-20˚ to the north (just eyeballing it). So the cone needs to be centered around that tilt. The size of the needed obstruction-free cone will shrink as Starlink launches more satellites - it may already be smaller, since that number was fro the early days of the Beta testing. If I get time, I'll go out and measure the size of the cone the app recommends in my area. Obviously, the easier way to do this is option 1: invite a friend with a smart phone over.
When I set up mine, I walked into the space between my 2 story house 45 feet to the NE, a two story garage to the north, some tall trees 60 feet to the SW-W, and some more trees to the SW-S-E but those are either smaller or further away. The top of a young maple 20' to the south was just barely a problem by the time I go far enough away from the house and garage, so instead of putting the dish on the ground, I put our picnic table in that spot and screwed the base of the dish to it. Once the system is up and running, it builds a map of obstructions and tracks how much signal loss is due to obstructions. I can't tell you what the report looks like when you check it in the app, because mine just says "Not Obstructed. All good! Starlink has not been obstructed recently."
The app also reports statistics once your system has been up and running. Mine reports that in the last 12 hours, we lost signal due to no satellites in view for a total of 27 seconds. We lost signal due to "Beta Downtime" (planned outages for upgrades/updates) for a total of 5 minutes in that 12 hours.
I've had 2+ hour Zoom meetings recently where the only issue was a couple of 1 second "stutters". This is improved from when we first connected a couple of weeks ago, where I'd get briefly disconnected, the reconnect 5 or 10 seconds later.
