New Starlink Dish Quietly Released – The “Portable” Dish We Were Hoping For?
If you’ve been waiting for a more portable, more RV-friendly Starlink satellite to be released, you might like this news. (Or not, we’ll get into it.)
The Starlink website was just updated with a new version of the Starlink dish that appears to be slightly more portable, allowing you to lug it around more easily without having to carry around the large feet to set it up on.
This new dish is labeled the “Standard” dish. Instead of having a whole mounting base with feet, it’s basically a rectangle with a removable kickstand, with some additional mounting options included in a Mounting Kit.
The real question: is it portable? We’ll discuss that in more detail shortly as we are updating this article in real-time.
This design allows you to self-orient the dish or lay it flat, instead of relying on the internal motors to automatically orient the dish.
In their instructional video, we can see that the kickstand and extra mounting options allow you to mount it on a flat surface, or remove the kickstand and use a pipe adapter to mount it on an eve, wall, or roof. It’s currently unclear whether the extra mounting accessories like the pipe adapter are included in the Standard kit, but we will update this article with more information.
What’s Included In The Box
According to the Starlink website, the “Standard” kit comes with the Starlink terminal (what we plebes would refer to as the satellite dish), a kickstand, a Gen 3 Router, a Starlink Cable, an AC Cable, and a Power Supply.
What’s New About This Starlink Dish
Here’s what we can see right away:
- The dish itself is actually slightly bigger (detailed size comparison coming)
- It appears to use more power
- It possibly has a different connector than the v2 dish based on the online drawings, which would be nice. (The v2 wire connectors have been known to be fragile and faulty.)
- It comes with the latest router, which thus far has only been available to a small number of customers who have discovered they have access to purchase it. As of writing this article, it’s not available for me in my personal Starlink app shop.
- It has a separate power supply, so the power supply is not built into the router in this version.
- It is factory-designed to be capable of permanent, flat installation.
PROS
- It’s flat-mountable straight from the factory
- You no longer have to mutiliate the dish by cutting it open to disable the motors if you want to manually mount it in a specific position or flat-mount it
- It may have a better plug/connector – check out the “install the cables” portion of the setup guide. Might even be a standard Ethernet connector
CONS
- Not 12v. Still 120v.
- Uses more power
- Bigger
- There are more parts to it. Router and power supply instead of all-in-one. This means more stuff that could potentially break.
Is this Starlink dish more portable?
You could call the v3 dish more portable, but there are some caveats. Given that it’s larger and takes more power, it’s safe to say this isn’t the super-small, portable dish RVers and nomads have been hoping for.
In fact, the Starlink website itself says that the Standard dish is ideal for residential applications on the Specifications page – see under the “APPLICATIONS” label below.
However, if your intention is to permanently flat mount the dish on your RV, then this eliminates a significant amount of the hassle in doing so. So it could still be a better choice for your RV Starlink setup, depending on exactly how you want to mount and carry your dish with your camper.
OLD VS NEW DIMENSIONS – specific comparisons coming in a few moments…
OLD VS NEW POWER USAGE– specific comparisons coming in a few moments…
What dish options do you have now? Can you buy it now?
Currently, we don’t know if you can get this new dish when ordering hardware right now. When going through the motions to order a new Starlink setup, the interface doesn’t specify which hardware you’re getting – it just says $599 for hardware. So whether this will simply be the default option in the lineup at the base $599 price or a separate option remains to be uncovered.
