I like my Starlink Gen 3 dish (even though it fell off the pipe adapter)

Here's a report on my installation of the Starlink Gen 3 dish, which I bought so our Gen 1 dish could serve as a backup. First, some background.

This is how I started off a post about needing to have a blacksmith make me a pipe to fit in the poorly designed pipe adapter for the Gen 3 dish. I called the post, "A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter."

I've been a happy Starlink customer since January 2021, when I reported on the installation of the first generation round dish that I was chosen to be a public beta tester for. I described my tale in "Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount."

Since, that Gen1 dish has worked flawlessly, though Starlink has had its reliability ups and downs, with recent experience being much more on the upside, probably due to the much larger number of Starlink satellites in orbit now.

But nothing lasts forever, and my wife and I are heavily dependent on the much faster broadband we enjoy with Starlink compared to the crappy 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL brought to us via the non-cutting edge technology of copper phone wires.

So when Starlink sent me an email last year saying that as a beta customer I could purchase the new third generation dish, getting several months of service free if I bought it now, I decided to buy the Gen3 kit.

My plan was to use the Gen3 dish, router, and power supply, leaving the deactivated Gen1 dish up on our roof as backup if something went wrong with the Gen3 kit and we had to wait a while before replacement equipment could arrive.

I ordered the new version of the Ridgeline Mount, as I wanted to put the Gen3 dish next to the Gen1 dish.

Here's a photo of the rectangular Gen 3 dish on our roof nestled next to the round Gen 1 dish. The Ridgeline Mount now has a different design. And you don't have to supply your own weights (I used bricks for the Gen 1 mount). The gray weights are supplied by Starlink.


This photo shows the angle of the Gen 3 dish. It doesn't have a motor like the Gen 1 and Gen 2 dishes. I gather that the fixed angle works because there are many more Starlink satellites up now.

The installation went quite smoothly. The 50 foot cable that comes with the Gen 3 kit looks like it will be able to follow the path of the 75 foot cable that the Gen 3 dish came with. I got a 150 foot cable just in case it didn't.

Pleasingly, both cables fit through the hole in the side of the house leading to our living room, where the router and power supply are. (The Gen 1 cable is permanently attached to the dish, so I had to leave it up, which is fine, since like I said, the Gen 1 dish will be a backup in case of problems with the Gen 3 dish.)

It was a bit of a pain to have to get back on the roof when the Starlink app told me the dish needed adjusting. That's the downside of not having a motor that turns the dish.

I believe the app said that the dish was 16 degrees off. I took my iPhone up on the roof and fiddled with the Gen 3 dish. It was kind of frustrating to rotate the dish, check the app to see if it was aligned correctly, then see that Starlink wanted it rotated back the other way.

The best I could do was get the dish just 8 degrees off. One reason is that I had to loosen the set screw on the pipe adapter, then turn the dish with one hand while looking at the Starlink app that I was holding in my other hand. The download speeds seem higher than the Gen 3 dish was giving us, so I'm not going to worry about the dish not being in the precisely correct position.

(The speeds vary a lot. Usually they're between 75 Mbps and 200 Mbps.)

A bigger aggravation was the dish falling off the pipe adapter when the wind was just 40 mph or so, maybe higher with gusts. That isn't exactly a hurricane. As noted in my post about the pipe adapter, the set screw just relies on friction to hold the dish to the pipe adapter. I thought I had the screw firmly tightened. Here's a photo.

But one morning the Starlink app said that the dish was 36 degrees off. Figures, since the dish was lying on the roof. We'd had about 40 mph winds the night before, maybe a bit higher with gusts. Not a hurricane, though.

You can see that there's not much room for a pipe to fit into the adapter. I was fortunate that the dish only fell a foot or so, landing on the back side. (We still had a decent internet connection even while the dish was lying on the sloping roof.) Some Starlink owners have to put their dish on a tall pipe/pole to get above obstructions. In that case, the dish falling off would be a bigger deal.

I can't understand why Starlink is shipping the Gen 3 dish with such a messed-up way of attaching it to a pipe. This is a photo from my previous post about having a blacksmith make a pipe that fit as snugly as possible into the adapter. Without the "telescope" feature welded on to the end of the pipe, which couldn't be any larger and still fit into the Ridgeline Mount, the set screw would have needed to be screwed in much further, with more ability for the pipe to loosen in a high wind.

Hopefully the dish won't fall off again. I've tightened the screw as much as I could.

Comments

[Nw]

I’d loop a zip tie around the pipe and the screw to provide an extra stop against vertical lift.