Starlink Mini

[sail sail]

I am doing quite a few yacht deliveries these days and was thinking about getting a Starlink Mini. Does anyone have any first hand experience of taking one with them offshore (I have a Transat coming up in April)? Do they work well?

 

[lustyd]

All of Starlink works well, the downsides are power and money. If you can fit within the “standby” bandwidth then it’s cheap but otherwise quite pricey. If you use it for a few hours power is OK but many boats will struggle to keep up with it 24x7, it’s like a second fridge being on.

Game changer though, there’s no going back.

 

[john_q]

My mini uses about 24 watts on 12v. I do have a booster to up the voltage to make it work off 12 volts. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPMPT3JK?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title or https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMVFH7BN?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

Mine is on roaming and was bought in Guatemala, so, after 60 days out of the country it is stops working, so, turn it off for a few days and it will start working again.

 

[geem]

I am doing quite a few yacht deliveries these days and was thinking about getting a Starlink Mini. Does anyone have any first hand experience of taking one with them offshore (I have a Transat coming up in April)? Do they work well?

If you are offshore, you need to be on the Roam Unlimited tariff that is £96/month plus £2/GB. It works well offshore.
We just did a transat and used it 3 times a day to look at weather info.
Apart from a slow time to connect, of up to 20 mins, it worked well.

 

[lustyd]

If you are offshore, you need to be on the Roam Unlimited tariff that is £96/month plus £2/GB. It works well offshore.
We just did a transat and used it 3 times a day to look at weather info.
Apart from a slow time to connect, of up to 20 mins, it worked well.

Not any more. The £5/month standby mode works everywhere and although limited on bandwidth it does work offshore.

 

[geem]

Not any more. The £5/month standby mode works everywhere and although limited on bandwidth it does work offshore.

If you are happy with dial up modem kind of performance

 

[lustyd]

If you are happy with dial up modem kind of performance

No, it's 10x what dial up provided. 0.5Mbps was broadband speed not very long ago, dial up maxed out at 56Kbps or 0.056Mbps. It won't support high definition movie streaming, but it's more than adequate for most boat needs.

 

[geem]

No, it's 10x what dial up provided. 0.5Mbps was broadband speed not very long ago, dial up maxed out at 56Kbps or 0.056Mbps. It won't support high definition movie streaming, but it's more than adequate for most boat needs.

Ok, my pal switch down to it from the ocean roam in his ocean passage. He didn't give it the glowing report you are giving it. He said things like Facebook posts took ages to open. Video would stop and was pretty clunky. Video calls on WhatsApp were pretty rubbish.
I may try it when my £50/month roam is due up

 

[lustyd]

As I said, it's not for video, so your pal misunderstood the product. For weather and news, and basic contact like email and phone calls it's more than enough bandwidth.
If you want full modern broadband in the middle of an ocean then there is an associated cost - there's only one game in town for the foreseeable future and that's Starlink. I think it's very generous of them to even offer the £5/month option for those who don't need or want high bandwidth.

 

[geem]

As I said, it's not for video, so your pal misunderstood the product. For weather and news, and basic contact like email and phone calls it's more than enough bandwidth.
If you want full modern broadband in the middle of an ocean then there is an associated cost - there's only one game in town for the foreseeable future and that's Starlink. I think it's very generous of them to even offer the £5/month option for those who don't need or want high bandwidth.

I would be happy to be on the £5/month but an elderly farther inlaw with poor health, necessitates regular video calls home.
For us, even at £50/50GB, it's cheaper than a local prepaid sim card here.

 

[lustyd]

I would be happy to be on the £5/month but an elderly farther inlaw with poor health, necessitates regular video calls home.
For us, even at £50/50GB, it's cheaper than a local prepaid sim card here.

Completely agree. We pay the £96/month as it's an excellent service and this is our "home" broadband. The £5 500Kbps service absolutely blows the socks off of the Iridium Go which runs at 2.4Kbps for 50 bucks. The only reason I see for Iridium Go to exist now is the lower power, but then a Starlink switched on for 5 minutes at 500Kbps can achieve the same in 7 minutes as the Go in a whole day, so arguably even power isn't better.

 

[geem]

Completely agree. We pay the £96/month as it's an excellent service and this is our "home" broadband. The £5 500Kbps service absolutely blows the socks off of the Iridium Go which runs at 2.4Kbps for 50 bucks. The only reason I see for Iridium Go to exist now is the lower power, but then a Starlink switched on for 5 minutes at 500Kbps can achieve the same in 7 minutes as the Go in a whole day, so arguably even power isn't better.

I wonder if Musk has done it to destroy Go's business?

 

[Ray Purchase]

https://www.independent.co.uk/space...iGEhrzndMgR14AoCZX_aem_-U0j0lIiNKGhJ5WLDvWa7g

 

[lustyd]

I wonder if Musk has done it to destroy Go's business?

Someone had to, Iridium hasn’t changed or improved in decades as they considered it finished.

 

[geem]

Someone had to, Iridium hasn’t changed or improved in decades as they considered it finished.

The Garmin Inreach uses the iridium network. We had major issues with their network crossing the pond last year. Not just me, our firends as well. When we contacted Garmin, their attitude was awful. They wanted details down to the minute of when we had problems. They were incredibly unhelpful. The Iridium network is dicrepid. I can't see us using the inreach on any more ocean crossings

 

[Sea Change]

Someone had to, Iridium hasn’t changed or improved in decades as they considered it finished.

They launched an entire replacement constellation of satellites about a decade ago (on SpaceX rockets!) so it's surprising that they haven't followed up that enormous investment with a matching service.

 

[lustyd]

They launched an entire replacement constellation of satellites about a decade ago (on SpaceX rockets!) so it's surprising that they haven't followed up that enormous investment with a matching service.

Iridium is too high to be a better service, they can't increase bandwidth without reducing the number of customers/endpoints. They're in a really weird position as they can't cut off existing customers so their only option was further investment by launching a whole new constellation at different altitude. They obviously chose to sweat the assets and wait for the business to die of natural causes.
It does have some benefits over Starlink, but it's increasingly looking like most customers don't care about those things.

 

[Sea Change]

We bought a Mini in SXM and it's been very good. Held off as long as possible- no need to further line Musk's pockets- but following reports from friends it was clearly the only sensible option once we were north of the Digicel Caribbean coverage area.

We've put very little effort in to running it, literally plug it in to the inverter and stick it on deck.

It uses about 23w when running. If you wanted, you could run it directly from a DC power source to save inverter losses. In fact, for a delivery skipper, you might want to hook it up to a decent power bank if you had concerns about the yacht electrical system. You'd get about four hours out of a standard phone-sized power bank, which isn't a lot but if you're just checking GRIBs and emails twice a day it would do the job.

The 'pause' feature is useful, but frustrating. We switched to it when we were in the yard, rather than pay the next month's full subscription just before flying home.

It does work, but it's very patchy. You really can't complain for £5 though. It would occasionally allow Netflix or YouTube, and it seemed to like my wife's phone better than mine . But you need patience. Absolutely fine for low data stuff. I was researching a bunch of stuff to buy for the boat and it did my head in, with some webpages taking several minutes to load.