Re: [Starlink] Starlink power use & satellite tracking

[Nathan Owens <nathan@nathan.io>]

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I’m near a bunch of gateways in Eastern Washington state, and also a closed
cell for new subscribers.

Not sure how much bearing the gateway has on the dish power use, especially
with ISLs now.

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 9:27 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> 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@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 Aucklandu.speidel@auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
>
>
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