I have friends on yachts who are using Starlink dishes with great success in Patagonia, Brazil and other parts of South America. So I decided to buy one and temporarily set it up at home to see how well it worked.

I bought the Starlink Global ROAM package. The dish itself is just 12” x 20” and easy to set up. The hardware cost about US$700 but the “best effort” global service plan is US$200/month. “Best effort” means “you get what you get” in terms of speed. At times I get greater than 100 Mb download speed, more typically 30 – 50 Mb. Not super fast but certainly adequate and still vastly better than the Iridium GO I now have on board. I wouldn’t want it for a permanent installation at home since I have an optical fiber connection here providing as much data speed as I’m willing to pay for. The ROAM service plan is a month-to-month plan so I can stop and restart the service (and monthly cost) to suit how I intend to use it.

My plan is to take this Starlink back to the boat, assuming I can get it through Chilean Customs without too much drama. There are a number of videos on YouTube of people removing or disabling the motors in their dishes and mounting them horizontal on the top of RV’s, vans and boats (planes?). Apparently the Starlink satellite constellation is now dense enough that this works about as well as the motor-steered dish and obviously would be mechanically much simpler with less wind resistance. I’m considering doing this but am hesitant because it involves cutting the plastic shell and resealing it into a new horizontal mount of some kind. Given it’s going to be on a boat with big waves (I’ve had waves break over the whole boat, flooding the deck and cockpit), having it be water tight is an important criteria. Some ad hoc mounting work will be required at the boatyard in Puerto Montt where my boat is now headed.

There is also the issue of using it offshore since the service plan says land only. There supposedly is a geofence so the thing won’t work when you get about 12 nm or so offshore, or so they say. However, I’ve heard reports of people using Starlink while crossing the Pacific on yachts so it remains to be seen if the geofence really kills service offshore.