Adolfo Posted July 29, 2022 Share Posted July 29, 2022 After my initial installation at my home in rural Georgia, I mounted it on the roof between the main and second floor. it was the best I could do on my own, but that placement height I knew would have many obstructions. The trees on our property surround our home and there are many mature trees that are at least 30 to 40 feet high. Despite the significant obstructions, the times the service wasn't obstructed resulted in many times where my service would be interrupted, I was still able to stream TV. Services like Teams meetings and other live video chat would often be interrupted since those services don't buffer additional data like streaming TV does. The streaming mostly worked without interruption and significantly better than Windstream's DSL 3mbps speed. Knowing I had to change the location, I decided to purchase a 25 foot telescopic antenna pole and had it mounted up on the next roof level up, approximately 30 feet above the ground. So the height of the roof and the telescopic antenna holder significantly raised my dishy. Although I still show my dish is obstructed, it is signficantly less than it was prior to the change. My app still says I'm obstructed but since this installation I have never seen the dish go offline. The statistics warn to expect obstructions every 2 minutes, but honestly last time I was there, those obstructions were not noticeable while using my internet. On average there are about 6 minutes of obstructions over a twelve hour period. Feels tolerable and insignificant, considering that I never notice any downtime. If I really want to eliminate all the obstructions, I may need to trim back a few more trees - not cheap. Should I spend the money to eliminate all of the obstructions if it doesn't appear to actually be impacting the reliability of my use. Screenshot from the app is attached. Does anyone have an opinion on whether or not my reported service experience could be even more impressive if I trip the tops of the trees that show up as obstructions? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DirecPC Posted July 30, 2022 Share Posted July 30, 2022 Hard to compare the graphic but it looks similar to what mine looked like before I decided to have the dish moved atop a tower to clear trees I was not willing to cut down. Pre and Post move I don't see much noticeable difference in speed, first day I thought it was slower but since then I find the performance is the same overall , blazing fast one test in the am and so so the next, and dropping below 50 mbs in the afternoon. I suspect unless your obstructions are knocking you off line quite often like every minute maybe, they probably don't have much effect on speed. What eliminating the obstructions does however is that in the statistics part of the starlink app, "outages" due to obstructions totally disappears. Pre and post move I didnt really notice the 2 seconds or greater outages every so many minutes the app tracks, either in web browsing or streaming. Once in a while I noticed my cell phone calls would get a bit warbly (we have no cell signal here, so to use our cell phone our calls go through a femto cell box connected to a router in switch mode connected to the ethernet adaptor connected to the starlink router). No problems with cell calls now. The other effect, not so much on performance, but on customer service. I was puzzled by the way the starlink would test fast speed one minute and slow down , sometimes to DSL speed, the next, so I had a ticket for that. Took a week to get a response. And then it was, remove your obstructions. Ok, done, still weird. Works but wierd, is this how its supposed to work? CS got back pretty quick, had me run tests through and out of the adaptor , and decided my router was acting whacky, so they are sending me a new router and adaptor. Whether that solves it or whether the real issue is just a whole lotta people coming on board, I dont know. But, I kinda suspect their tech support is pretty overloaded and if you have obstructions showing up in the app, whether or not you really notice any of the outages those cause problems or not, they will will want you to deal with it before they do more effort. Just my opinion. My tests and original obstruction pic here 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StarlinkLeader Posted July 31, 2022 Share Posted July 31, 2022 Currently there is decent congestion on starlink - May explain some of the issues your seeing speed wise even after removing obstacles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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