Starlink Standard vs. High Performance

[Darlin]

I had good service with mobile Starlink in the Sea of Cortez on a mooring ball last spring. I put the account in hold during the summer and reactivated Nov 1. It occasionally requires a reset but otherwise reliable.

 

[Mako]

Unless I missed it, sounds like everyone here is using the standard version, not the high performance, and not missing out on any significant coverage or speed.

 

[SteveK]

Unless I missed it, sounds like everyone here is using the standard version, not the high performance, and not missing out on any significant coverage or speed.

On the boat now. Regular dish started as the RV roam.
Have internet, WIFI, cell through WIFI. Rain all day save a few breaks so watching live TV with option for prime videos.
Game changer.

The high performance ocean version probably has benefits that I have not needed.

 

[tiltrider1]

I have 2 second drop outs occasionally. It’s possibly that if I had the high performance antenna that I wouldn’t suffer these drop outs. They just are not often enough to justify buying the high performance antenna.

I might buy the new smaller antenna when it’s available just to reduce my windage exposure.

 

[twistedtree]

Unless I missed it, sounds like everyone here is using the standard version, not the high performance, and not missing out on any significant coverage or speed.

I think unless you have both running side by side, you won't know what you have, and what you are missing. Steve Mitchell has run both and reported better reception on the fringes with the HP dish.


Early in this thread I listed several other benefits to the HP dish, all of which are packaging and installation/integration benefits and have nothing to do with performance. For me they are important differences. Whether it's worth the extra $2000 is up to you.

 

[mvweebles]

I have the standard rectangular dish. Ive been running down the coast of Baja and am currently 40 miles out of almost 200 across to Mazatlan. Dish drops out fairly frequently, and I had difficulty toggling the $2/gb option this morning. I strongly suspect the hi-performance antenna would resolve these issues.

Granted, not many TFers venture to the edges of Musks empire, but maybe parts of Alaska qualify.

Peter

 

[Retriever]

We’re currently about 700nm off the California coast and 1400nm from Hawaii and Starlink is working brilliantly. We have a HP dishy and downtime for the last 12 hours is just 10 seconds.

This is dramatically better performance than we had in February on the way from Hawaii to Guam. Then it was common to have 45 minutes of downtime every 12 hours. On that run we had both standard and flat HP running, and the flat HP was dramatically better…about half the downtime that the regular dishy experienced.

I’m not sure if the better service we’re experiencing now has to do with our geographic location or improvements in the Starlink constellation.

The HP antenna has performed so well that I turned off the service to the smaller dishy; it’s a redundancy now and I have a trusted shoreside person to reactivate service via inReach message if necessary.

We did find that Starlink is geofenced near Russia. It cut out for about 18 hours when we left Japan and were within maybe 50nm of the Kuril Islands. It also didn’t work nearly as well in Prince William Sound, where frequent dropouts made voice/video calls impossible.