Another starlink question

Hi William,

Simple answer is No, the Mini is sold as a mobile devise and not as a residential dish which are also bigger and permanently mounted.

Cheers

Stephen

I use a mini when I’m travelling on the$80 plan then standby when home.

At home I have a Starlink set up permanently on the roof on a $69 plan, better service than the nbn. Starlink supply the house equipment for free.

Screenshot of my Starlink options
Also you can activate a new Starlink anywhere (that you can get satellites) regardless wether it for roaming or residential
And I did activate my mini on residential when I first got it
Cheers
Robbo

Well I've pulled the trigger and brought a Starlink mini.
Now the games begin.
William

Just sharing a bit of our personal experience/story with Starlink as long-term travellers, as most people these days understandably recommend the Mini, but our reasoning has ended up a bit different based on how heavily we rely on it for work.

We’ve been using Starlink since early 2023 and started with the Gen 2 - the motorised rectangular dish before the Mini arrived in 2024.

Starlink have been excellent to deal with. We had one very sad "operator error" incident with the Gen 2. We had packed it away in its storage area in the rear of the vehicle on top of the roller drawers - still connected to power, but forgot to put it into stow/packaway mode and shut it down properly.

It was sitting face down, still trying to orient itself and find satellites. As we're driving, we became aware of this strange whirring noise and kept wondering what it was - was it the trailer, was something rubbing, what was making that sound? By the time it clicked, it was too late. The motor was fried. I think it was my fault...:(

From a riverside camp at Owen Springs in Central Australia we used the Starlink online support form asking what we should do? Next thing we get a message back saying effectively "it’s shipped and on its way to your home address". Great customer service... except we weren’t going home for another couple of years! What a palava that became trying to redirect it and organise collection from a post office further along our travels. We had no real plan for where we would be, when! We eventually collected it in Townsville.

To be honest though, that whole experience taught us a lot about long-term travel logistics. Being able to predict and commit to being in one location on a certain date really isn’t in our DNA. Before our big 2023-2025 trip we were usually only away maybe 4 months at a time, so most things could just wait until you got home. But once you’re travelling long term, you quickly realise how important online ordering and freight logistics become. You work out systems pretty fast because eventually something always needs replacing, repairing or upgrading.

Interestingly though, the Gen 2 still technically worked. We just lost the auto-tracking motor function, so we manually positioned it ourselves and it connected fine. That actually gave us confidence that manually aiming a dish was perfectly workable in real travel situations. So when the Gen 3 arrived without auto-tracking, we already knew it was a practical and probably more robust solution anyway. The deal however was it had to send it back in the same packaging the new one arrived in.

David converted our Gen 3 to 12V pretty quickly because we spend long periods fully off-grid relying on solar. What we’ve found is that Starlink can start dictating campsite selection more than you expect. We were constantly chasing solar input to keep up with power needs, and ended up changing solar panel types - finding the iTech world soft panels less capable than the hard Kings panels! With our limited packing space, the inconvenience of that reality meant a bit of a packing adjustment but it was worth it. You also need a clear sky view for Starlink connectivity, so suddenly camp selection starts revolving around sun access and sky visibility. That can be tricky in places like Tasmania and Victoria with hills and trees everywhere. Much less of an issue in the deserts and outback areas of WA and SA.

Then we had another mishap... someone tripped on the cable and pulled the Gen 3 clean off the roof. It cracked the face of the dish. We taped it up because we were worried about water ingress if it rained, and that was over a year ago - it still works perfectly.

We’ve looked seriously at the Mini because the compact size is appealing for travel, but after comparing performance and our actual workload needs, the Gen 3 still suits us better. Since we run our whole business remotely through Starlink, reliability and throughput matter more than convenience for us.

There’s also the fact David built a pretty neat integrated router/setup around the Gen 3 system already, so changing to the Mini becomes more than just swapping the dish itself. It turns into a bigger and more expensive changeover than it first appears.

So at this stage we still haven’t decided whether, when the time comes, we’ll simply replace the cracked Gen 3 with another Gen 3 or make the jump to the Mini instead.

From our research, internet performance while driving generally won’t match a properly set up stationary dish, and we don’t currently run that kind of in-motion setup anyway. To be honest, part of the joy of outback travel for us is being offline sometimes. We actually like disconnecting for periods of time, then setting up properly and doing focused "work sessions" when needed rather than being permanently connected 24/7.

What’s surprised us most travelling Australia long-term is actually how good normal mobile coverage has become. We use Telstra and yes, there are still blackspots exactly where you’d expect them, but for general travel it’s often more than sufficient.

That’s also important for us because it keeps us testing ExplorOz Traveller in real-world conditions - offline for days, reconnecting later, syncing data, uploading reviews and photos, checking trip planning, updating Places, mapping work etc. A lot of the improvements through Traveller versions 8, 9 and now 10 came directly from solving those kinds of offline/online workflow challenges while travelling ourselves.

We’re definitely not typical users though - we basically run our full office remotely from the road, including app development and mapping work. For casual travellers, the needs are probably very different. Each to their own.

Thanks if you stuck with my long story this far - Michelle ;)
Hopefully I haven't made too many technical errors in my explanation as I'm not the technical expert.

You learn something new every day. Today I learned that you CAN activate a new dish onto Standby, if you know how. See here.

Starlink mini power up
by Jasonoid a solid youtuber .

I thought this YouTube video from Jasonoid that came up on my feed maybe of some interest to some starlink users .