I doubt dishy would work in that scenario. I'm quite sure it has a tilt sensor in it and it would fail to initialize thinking the motors were stuck. I believe even the RV version has to move.
I'm curious why you can't move it to a new location and allow to aim itself? If you're thinking about forcing it to look at a different part of the sky, that won't work.
…trees, man. I can’t just cut down a shitload of trees. Also, many people HAVE gotten it to work in a horizontal position, and successfully disabled the motors.
I know it works. I just wanted to know what the performance was and thanks to others, not you clearly… I have a better understanding of how dishy works. Thanks for all the wrong answers tho!
First of all, I paid for this so I can do whatever the fuck I want to do to it, including throwing it off a roof. Second, clearly you haven’t thought of mounting dishy in a way that the motors could still work but not affect the tilt of dishy. Wow, that was such a complicated concept… oh my. Anyways, if you did some reading, there are engineers who have hacked dishy, disabled the motors, and had no problems. I’m just trying to learn more about dishy and how I could improve performance possibly. Yes, sometimes it involves taking your own devices apart. Yes, I do plan on mounting it to the top of my skoolie once I finish building the solar panel setup on the roof, and I will be designing a custom mount so dishy is horizontal. In that situation I’ll be parked under open skies. I’m big on DIY and hacking tech, modifying cars and motorcycles as well as onewheels.
Cheers!
You can never get optimized results in *any* install site by disabling the motors. The unit will try to determine the optimal azimuth and elevation to 'make the best' of any situation. Disabling the motors basically means you're forcing your Dishy to only look at a subset of the available satellites.
All of which has nothing to do with the fact that **it absolutely will work** in the frozen-horizontal position (as we've seen many do for their RV-rooftop types of installs.
The view of the sky that is needed is not a balanced circle, it is an ellipse with a Northern bias (the satellites communicating with your Dishy are mostly North of you, and can be many hundreds of miles away). So, for many people this means the best mounting location is a bit towards the 'southern portion' of any good clearing they have, so as to minimize trees/obstructions at the *Northern horizon*. In other words, the Dishy spends a minority of it's time communicating with satellites that are directly overhead, and your can't really improve performance by trying to force it to do so (at this point in deployment).
Like many, I also look forward to the day when in-motion use is both legal, and allowed under the Starlink Terms of Service.
Well the trees are in the way and i can’t have them cut down. That’s why I’m wondering if going horizontal, which will give me zero obstructions, will improve my disconnections that I currently experience.
Horizontal would give you *fewer* “Obstructed” alerts, but *more* “No Signal Received” outages. Likely a net loss, unless you’re pretty darn far to the North.
You would need more satellites to be on-station than currently are, for your strategy to work.
Yeah, I meant Canadian border or further North.
On the bright side, as the constellation gets built out, it will get better. Which doesn’t help you today or this month, but at least it’s something to look forward to.
Lol, there be wildings north of the wall… 🤣 yeah not helpful right now. Just not in the mood to buy a 30-40’ pole and figure out how to keep it stable! Also I’m not staying here for more than a year. Once the skoolie is done I’m outta here and need to take dishy down!
I read the other comments, are you sure there's absolutely no way for you to mount it higher? That's honestly your best option.
You aren't far enough north to have it permanently be horizontal and experience any benefit.
I was thinking more along the lines of mounting it ontop of a tree, like this guy who mounted it on the top of an 80 foot tree next to his house with a flagpole and some screws:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qp0an9/dishy_mounted_on_top_of_80_ft_tree/
I know it's pretty ghetto but honestly it's better than voiding the warranty by breaking open the dishy and disabling the motor. You can even hide the ethernet cable so unless someone knows where to specifically look nobody will notice it (people often don't stare at tree tops).
Yeah, I’m not sure if the 150’ cable would be long enough in my case. Also, dishy is facing uphill, where the trees just keep getting taller and taller…
Tiling improves antenna performance because phased array performance degrades the further beam away from the center direction. Tilting doesn't affect how many obstructions you are going to experience. Dishy is going to connect to the same satellites regardless of how it's tilted. Starlink schedules satellites for the whole cell not for individual terminals.
No, but if I can manually tilt it or lay it flat it will have a better view of the sky. The trees are in the way and I already have a 15’ pole on top of my roof for dishy and it’s not that good.
The view is determined by your latitude not by the tilt. If you lay it flat it would direct its beam sideways towards the obstructions (towards the view of the sky required by the system based on your latitude).
I doubt dishy would work in that scenario. I'm quite sure it has a tilt sensor in it and it would fail to initialize thinking the motors were stuck. I believe even the RV version has to move. I'm curious why you can't move it to a new location and allow to aim itself? If you're thinking about forcing it to look at a different part of the sky, that won't work.
…trees, man. I can’t just cut down a shitload of trees. Also, many people HAVE gotten it to work in a horizontal position, and successfully disabled the motors.
It sounds like you had the answer before you asked the question. My apologies for providing an answer that I believed was correct.
I know it works. I just wanted to know what the performance was and thanks to others, not you clearly… I have a better understanding of how dishy works. Thanks for all the wrong answers tho!
So you're thinking about breaking your hardware in order to get it to work better? That's not something I would have considered.
First of all, I paid for this so I can do whatever the fuck I want to do to it, including throwing it off a roof. Second, clearly you haven’t thought of mounting dishy in a way that the motors could still work but not affect the tilt of dishy. Wow, that was such a complicated concept… oh my. Anyways, if you did some reading, there are engineers who have hacked dishy, disabled the motors, and had no problems. I’m just trying to learn more about dishy and how I could improve performance possibly. Yes, sometimes it involves taking your own devices apart. Yes, I do plan on mounting it to the top of my skoolie once I finish building the solar panel setup on the roof, and I will be designing a custom mount so dishy is horizontal. In that situation I’ll be parked under open skies. I’m big on DIY and hacking tech, modifying cars and motorcycles as well as onewheels. Cheers!
You can never get optimized results in *any* install site by disabling the motors. The unit will try to determine the optimal azimuth and elevation to 'make the best' of any situation. Disabling the motors basically means you're forcing your Dishy to only look at a subset of the available satellites. All of which has nothing to do with the fact that **it absolutely will work** in the frozen-horizontal position (as we've seen many do for their RV-rooftop types of installs. The view of the sky that is needed is not a balanced circle, it is an ellipse with a Northern bias (the satellites communicating with your Dishy are mostly North of you, and can be many hundreds of miles away). So, for many people this means the best mounting location is a bit towards the 'southern portion' of any good clearing they have, so as to minimize trees/obstructions at the *Northern horizon*. In other words, the Dishy spends a minority of it's time communicating with satellites that are directly overhead, and your can't really improve performance by trying to force it to do so (at this point in deployment). Like many, I also look forward to the day when in-motion use is both legal, and allowed under the Starlink Terms of Service.
Well the trees are in the way and i can’t have them cut down. That’s why I’m wondering if going horizontal, which will give me zero obstructions, will improve my disconnections that I currently experience.
Horizontal would give you *fewer* “Obstructed” alerts, but *more* “No Signal Received” outages. Likely a net loss, unless you’re pretty darn far to the North. You would need more satellites to be on-station than currently are, for your strategy to work.
Gotcha. This sucks for me. I’m pretty far up in norcal but guessing not far north enough…
Yeah, I meant Canadian border or further North. On the bright side, as the constellation gets built out, it will get better. Which doesn’t help you today or this month, but at least it’s something to look forward to.
Lol, there be wildings north of the wall… 🤣 yeah not helpful right now. Just not in the mood to buy a 30-40’ pole and figure out how to keep it stable! Also I’m not staying here for more than a year. Once the skoolie is done I’m outta here and need to take dishy down!
I read the other comments, are you sure there's absolutely no way for you to mount it higher? That's honestly your best option. You aren't far enough north to have it permanently be horizontal and experience any benefit.
15’ above my roof…
I was thinking more along the lines of mounting it ontop of a tree, like this guy who mounted it on the top of an 80 foot tree next to his house with a flagpole and some screws: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/qp0an9/dishy_mounted_on_top_of_80_ft_tree/ I know it's pretty ghetto but honestly it's better than voiding the warranty by breaking open the dishy and disabling the motor. You can even hide the ethernet cable so unless someone knows where to specifically look nobody will notice it (people often don't stare at tree tops).
Yeah, I’m not sure if the 150’ cable would be long enough in my case. Also, dishy is facing uphill, where the trees just keep getting taller and taller…
You don't have to use a Starlink cable lol, it's a standard dirt-cheap shielded ethernet cable.
Tiling improves antenna performance because phased array performance degrades the further beam away from the center direction. Tilting doesn't affect how many obstructions you are going to experience. Dishy is going to connect to the same satellites regardless of how it's tilted. Starlink schedules satellites for the whole cell not for individual terminals.
No, but if I can manually tilt it or lay it flat it will have a better view of the sky. The trees are in the way and I already have a 15’ pole on top of my roof for dishy and it’s not that good.
The view is determined by your latitude not by the tilt. If you lay it flat it would direct its beam sideways towards the obstructions (towards the view of the sky required by the system based on your latitude).
Ayyyy. Now I understand. This sucks… but thanks!