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Taking Starlink on a vacation sailing trip

A Starlink subscriber to the company’s RV option decided to try it on his sailing boat during a weeklong trip among the Greek islands, and found it worked surprisingly well.

They combined Starlink’s service with cellular connectivity and compared the two while using social media, Google maps, and video streaming. The outcome? Starlink and cellular complimented each other, according to Topolev.

Starlink suffered outages when it was surrounded by other boats’ masts or when the yacht made sharp turns, but worked well at sea, whereas cellular connectivity dropped out when the boat was far from the shore, Topolev said. “It was surprisingly good,” he said. “There were some outages and sometimes we had to manually reboot it … but basically it worked … almost all the time.”

The RV option is specifically for use in moving vehicles, though its use on a boat was not expected to be its prime target customers. Nonetheless, the test suggests strongly that Starlink will work quite well on the big cruise ships, one liner of which, Royal Caribbean, has already signed a deal to make Starlink operational by next year.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • Jeff Wright

    We still should have kept LORAN just in case.

  • Starlink RV is not intended for moving vehicles. Rather, it’s for portable use. You transport the turned-off dish from place to place, but while operating, your location is fixed.

    Various folks have experimented using Starlink while in motion (cars, boats) and yes it mostly works, but this is not licensed nor approved behavior. Interesting mix of legal and technical reasons why this is so.

    The recently announced Starlink Maritime is designed for use while in motion, as is the soon-to-be-real Starlink for aircraft.

  • Steve Golson: Thank you for the clarification.

  • GaryMike

    Star link’s software programmers are finally catching up to the needs of their remote subscribers.

    If you dangle a carrot, there better be a ‘GD’ carrot in evidence for the $.

    Or else.

    .

  • pzatchok

    My guess is that the Starlink systems used on the cruse ships is the same as used on land. They more than likely have two or three active at one time and the ships is not moving around like a small sail boat could.
    They also said that a few times it was because of being inside a large amount of masts that helped to block the signal. Not something you would find on the roof of a cruse ship

    I bet if you had two systems on top of a moving vehicle linked together and programed to have one track will the other searches for the next link it would work better.

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