[Starlink] Starlink power use & satellite tracking

[Ulrich Speidel]

Thanks all - really helpful and interesting information.

Also... could you please comment on:

  * How far your observations were from the closest gateway(s)
  * Whether you consider your cell Starlink virgin territory or close to
    subscriber saturation (https://www.starlink.com/map might help
    determine that - if it's light blue, it's likely the former, if it's
    "waitlist" blue but surrounded by light blue areas, or rural and
    close to a "waitlist blue" area, it's likely to be the latter.

On 17/02/2023 2:24 pm, Bruce Perens wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 3:08 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink 
> <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>       * Small inverters usually come with cigarette lighter cables,
>         and cigarette lighter sockets are typically fused with 8 or 10
>         A fuses. That puts maximum safe power outputs in the 96W to
>         130-something W range depending on battery voltage.
>
> When a larger inverter failed upon installation, I ran Starlink with 
> the router and rectangular dish for about 2 months, unattended, on a 
> Harbor Freight 250W inverter and 8 GC2 batteries.
>
> Unfortunately this sort of crashed and burned after the first snow. 
> The battery bank was 8 GC2 in series, and there was a 48V-12V 
> converter before the Harbor Freight inverter. I had 4 solar panels 
> flat on top of a freight container, simply so that they would not be 
> visiblle and the site would be low profile. These got covered by snow, 
> and I will tilt them up before the next snow season. The batteries 
> then got to a low voltage, and the lovely Victron battery protector 
> failed because I wired it backwards. Then I had a heart attack and 
> could not visit the site for 3 months. The battery bank discharged 
> entirely. I finally arrived to find ice at the top of 4 cells in the 
> battery bank. Fortunately it was only at the top, and I was able to 
> recover all of the batteries, rewire the protector, and put the site 
> back on the air.
>
> At that point, I switched to DishyPowa, connected via a hacked 
> Starlink Ethernet Adapter. This allows you to delete the inverter and 
> the Starlink router, and run the dish directly off of 48-52V DC. You 
> still need a router, because Starliink only provides one IPV4 DHCP 
> address to the Dishy, and you need to do the usual NAT thing on your 
> local net. But routers that run on 12V directly are easy to find.
>
>     Thanks
>
>     Bruce

-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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