Starlink hacking: disabling the positioning motors

Mounting a Starlink Dishy to a vehicle is best done by mounting it in a mostly flat orientation facing up to the sky, but the mounting post gets in the way and blocks that. So…

Recap

A few different approaches to this problem:

1. Just cut everything open to remove the post and motors, and try to seal it all up after in a home-made mount.
2. Do that using a manufactured mount…but you still have to cut everything open.
3. Remove just the motors and mounting post, without breaking the seal on the guts of the antenna, then mount everything into a fancy 3d printed mount.

But all those options were more complicated than I wanted. I wondered if there was a way just to disable the positioning motor on the mounting post, so it could be stowed away in a relatively low profile position. From what I found, it looks petty easy.

Disabling the motors

Step-by-step:

drilling a hole 5 inches from the bottom and side of the dish is a perfect location.

…but maybe stow the dish instead of going vertical, so that the post doesn’t get in the way of other mounting options.

Different step-by-step, with instructions to install a switch:

It doesn’t matter what type of hole-saw style drill bit you use, but I recommend finding a friend that has, or simply get, what is called an NMO hole drill bit. They limit your plunge depth so you can’t go ripping into the PCB below unless you do something REALLY dumb.

Control the depth of the hole saw with a thick application of tape:

The Black Tape on the Hole-Saw should prevent you from drilling too deep and hitting the circuit board. Be Cautious though.

That tip comes from Star-Mount Systems, the manufacturer of the the mounting hardware that requires opening up the antenna electronics. They now offer an expensive and bulky mount that works with a motor-disabled Starlink.

However you drill the hole, obviously plug it with something.

Tips from the boating community

Use two Starlinks:

Out of 30,000 packets sent through the SpeedFusion tunnel that bonds both Starlink connections and configured for WAN smoothing, only 52 were lost representing a mere 0.17% packet loss, which is super impressive! (I discuss WAN smoothing and SpeedFusion in much more detail below)

But in-motion usage was blocked in September 2022:

Though SpaceX has never officially supported using consumer Starlink systems while underway, for much of the past year this functionality has just worked - especially for those who took the extreme step of physically modifying a Starlink systems to disable the aiming motors so that it would sit flat.

But earlier this week, we began to hear more and more reports from RVers and boaters who were using their Starlink systems while underway that they were now suddenly dropping offline at speeds above ~10mph.

It seems that a mandatory firmware update rolling out from SpaceX has put a halt to Starlink usage while in motion.