Wall Mounted SpaceX Starlink – An installation in the Peak District

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• Olly Lennox
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Introduction…

By now we’ve all heard of Starlink;

A constellation of satellites offering Low-Latency, high-speed Satellite internet. We’ve had the pleasure and experience of installing Starlink for our various clients where traditional Ethernet/Fiber connections were abhorrently slow or simply didn’t exist (traditional ADSL/VDSL Connections).

One of our clients was in a particular bad spot. In the depths of the peak district: Quarnford.

For years our client had suffered first with the ADSL/VDSL route of 0.5mb up/down all the way to Satellite internet with Big Blue wherein they were getting 31mb down and 1.22mb up, at the cost of 625ms latency making Teams calls and any low-latency dependent applications practically unusable. The site was a constant source of headaches for our client, even going toward the additional expenditure of not one Big Blue antenna but two of them! Hoping that the extra bandwidth would help them along.

Then, when Starlink was announced we all waited with bated breath for the day when coverage would come in Quarnford.. And recently it did!

If you’ve ever seen an unboxing of a Starlink or one of the units in operation you’ll know they come with a fabricated metal stand that you can place on the floor and while flat surfaces may be freely available and usable in the vast majority of Starlink installs, in this instance it was not. The particular spot in Quarnford was particularly exposed to the elements. Regular high-winds, gusts, and due to the nature of the site there were no flat surfaces, no flat roof’s, and the slight wobble with the Starlink dish and the stand might have caused link issues (if you’ve ever had the chance to test the basic mount/stand the starlink comes with, you’d know what I mean!)

After having a search online for any wall-mount kits.. Hardly any existed. There were various home-made fabrications and people using T & K brackets and C-clamps but there was not anything we considered to be ‘industrial’ enough. There is of course on the Starlink Website a few wall mounted systems, but we wanted to have a mount that was completely solid, virtually zero movement to ensure a constant connection and finally give some relief to some very exasperated staff who’d been suffering with traditional Satellite broadband for years.

Lennox IT commissioned the help of one of our good friends whom came up with a bracket design which was virtually solid and would survive the specific task we had.

Discarding the existing mount entirely; A design has been implored where we have some adjustment on how far the mount extends from the side of the wall (or whatever surface you decide to mount this on) as well as various bolts and fixtures tightened to ensure absolutely zero movement.

Photo Gallery of our improved V2 mount…

The Result..

The installation all in all took us about 4 hours with a 2-man team, but the results were worth it!!

Where can I get one!?

This is a super-heavy duty fabrication that was intended to survive heavy gusts and the worst the Peak District could throw at it. We had an e-bay listing for this bracket but we found that it was difficult to ship, expensive to post, and difficult to install.

For those who’ve read this blog post before, We were talking about fabricating a smaller model which has the same rigidity and strength of the aforementioned mount, and we’ve finally come up with a design that we’re more than happy with! Offering virtually the same strength as the ‘Version 1’ of the bracket, at a considerably smaller footprint and cheaper postage

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154890477365

(you can also get in touch if you’re local to the area as we may be able to hook you up with an installer!)

We also plan to begin diversifying our offering, specifically we are going to be offering it in 3 different colours (polished steel, Black (current) and grey.) and we’re going to be making slight adaptations to this bracket as the months and installs pass.

Our client was so impressed with the installation and the results that we have even more of these in the pipeline and we very much look forward to doing it all again!