We do a lot of boondocking and need to work from wherever we are. I need connectivity all day for work, and cellular has been ok, but doesn't cover everywhere. We recently purchased a Starlink antenna, and went for the high performance dish as we wanted to just mount it on the roof and forget about it. It uses more power and I'm still in two minds about that, but permanent mounting and operation in motion sold me overall. In case anyone else wants to do this, I thought I'd document our install here
We don't use the TV antenna that came on the roof, and we never will - we only use streaming platforms, so Starlink will kindof be our TV antenna too lol. The space it was in looked prefect for the dish. In case anyone's interested, I added details of removing the TV antenna here (
https://www.airforums.com/forums/f31...ml#post2662774) - it was pretty easy!
After taking off the antenna and cleaning the old sealant up, I wiped it down with alcohol wipes and used a silly amount of 3M VHB tape to stick the wedge mount to the roof, before using Silkaflex around it to keep water out.
To get the cable inside, I copied the method described here (
http://johnjessjourney.com/index.php...our-airstream/), drilling a hole up into the roof in the top of our wardrobe, used a screwdriver to punch up a mark on the outer skin from below and then got on the roof and drilled back in where the mark showed up, making sure they aligned properly. I liked the advice in this video to think about where the ductwork was before drilling too. I bought a waterproof ABS box from Amazon, along with a grommet for the cable to go though from the outside and some plastic inserts to sit in the holes in the Aluminum so they don't rub on the cable. I then used the same 3M tape and Silkafex approach to get it mounted - in my case under an existing solar panel. I then covered the whole thing up with plastic/gorilla tape for a couple of days, to keep the rain off while the Silkaflex cured.
I pulled through enough of the cable from the outside to get to the Starlink power brick, but left most on the outside in case we ever end up somewhere where I have to move the antenna to get signal. To that end, I didn't use the screws provided and instead used removable latching screws, with added zip-ties through some new holes in the wedge mount to prevent them flicking off. It'd still be a pain to move it, but I could get it on/off in about 30min in each direction if needed, and the cable is nice and long.
I wanted to do a
12V conversion so we don't need the inverter, but have yet to see anyone do this for the higher power dish, so went with a half way approach. I bought a low power inverter with the best efficiency I could find and added a new path back to an unused fuse in the fuse box. I started with a 20A fuse and upped it to 30A when that blew about 30min later. I'm not using the Starlink router and instead plug the ethernet out form the power brick straight into our Peplink router's WAN connection. I didn't even need to enable the pass-through mode in the Starlink settings for it to work. That setting is a little scary as they say you have to be at your home address to reset it! The Starlink app doesn't work this way, and I'll try enabling the pass-through at the end of the trip when I can fix it if it doesn't do what I expect.
A few pics below in case it's helpful for anyone else. The end result is pretty low profile and you can barely see it beyond the solar panels. If I was doing it again I'd install the mount 2~3 inches further back. I thought it was going to be too close to the AC unit if I did it that way, but it would have been fine, and the cable is a bit tight to the skylight at the front. Also, that way the mount could probably have covered the hole left by the TV antenna too, meaning I wouldn't have had to add the extra patch.
Linear Mode
