The standard Starlink router and power supply (combined in the case of the [] dish, separate units for the () dish) are not ideal for use in a mobile application. They require 120-240VAC and are somewhat power hungry. This document details how to replace the router and/or power supply with a custom POE injector and an after-market router.
- A 12-48V DC-DC converter rated at 250W or better.
- Several shielded RJ45 connectors
- A crimp tool for the connectors and the knowledge to use it.
- A POE injector
- An aftermarket router
The cable supplied with the dish (either () or []) is an outdoor rated Cat5e ethernet cable. Any other ethernet cable you use (e.g. from the POE injector to the router) should be shielded Cat5e or Cat6.
At the dish end there is a proprietary connector, so it's impractical to do anything with this end. The () dish has a standard shielded RJ45 connector on the other end of the cable that plugs into the Starlink-supplied power supply, but unless you retain the Starlink power supply or acquire a special Starlink-compatible POE injector you won't be able to use this, and in any case you will probably want to shorten the cable. The cable can be cut and re-terminated with standard RJ45 shielded connectors - the color coding used by Starlink is standard for data (T568B) but see below about power.
The [] dish cable has a proprietary connector at the router end and therefore must be replaced with an RJ45 to use a different power supply irrespective of which POE injector you use.
The standard (or at least the most common standard and the one used by Starlink) wiring convention for RJ45 ethernet cables is known as T568B (or just 568B) and looks like this - viewed from the flat side of the connector, i.e. opposite the spring latch:
To attach an RJ45 connector to the cable you need a suitable crimp tool. If you aren't familiar with the process either find someone who is or watch one of the many YouTube videos that explain how to do it.
The dish cable is a shielded ethernet cable - this means it has an outer shield to protect from static electricity. The shield includes a bare wire inside the cable which must be connected to the metal shell of the RJ45 connector - fold the bare wire between two of the other wires and back out of the connector so that when it is crimped the wire contacts the metal shield.
Dishy is powered by POE (Power over Ethernet) at 48-56V, but with non-standard pin connections. To replace the Starlink power supply, I used a passive POE injector and a 12->48V DC-DC converter, allowing me to run the dish from 12V.
Power Over Ethernet supplies power over the same wires as are used for data and normally will provide +48V on pins 1,2,4 and 5 (the orange and blue pairs) with the return on the remaining pairs. Starlink for unexplained reasons chose to use pins 1,2,3, and 6 (the orange and green pairs) for the positive voltage instead. The voltage can be anywhere between 48 and 56V (with a short cable the lower voltage will be fine.)
Since off-the-shelf POE injectors are all wired to use the standard wires (1245), you either need a special Starlink-specific injector or to perform some trickery with the wiring. One possible source for a Starlink-specific POE injector is Dishypowa.com but at the time of writing they were not yet shipping. If you use one of these the cable can be terminated with an RJ45 shielded connector using standard 568B wiring, and you can ignore all references that follow to "swapped" wiring.
If you want to use a generic POE injector like the Tycon POE-INJ-1000-WT then you will need to wire the RJ45 connector on the end of the Dishy cable (and on one end of the patch cable from the injector to your router) in a non-standard way. By swapping the blue and green pairs on both sides of the injector the power ends up in the right place but the end-to-end mapping of cable pairs is unchanged.
The swapped wiring diagram for an RJ45 connector looks like this - as you can see it is the same as the 568B wiring but with the blue and green pairs swapped.
So the cable from the dish should be cut to the required length, and an RJ45 connector attached using SWAPPED wiring. Then make a patch cable to go from the POE injector to the router with one end SWAPPED and the other end standard 568B.
The entire wiring diagram then looks like this:
To provide the required 48VDC to the dish, you will need a 12-48V DC-DC converter. The dish requires up to 120W during boot (and when in snow-melt mode) but you should over-size the DC-DC converter - the cheaper units tend to over-state their capabilities, and you need the power supply to be able to handle short current peaks. I would recommend a minimum rating of 250W. I used this unit which is seriously over-sized for the job, and also requires a mounting case (3d model for that in this repository.) Others have reported success with a 384W uxcell converter which would make mounting easier.
If your DC-DC converter is adjustable (like the unit I used) you can set the output voltage a little higher than 48V, e.g. 52V, which will reduce the current slightly and ensure a solid 48V at the dish end after voltage drop in the cables. Do not exceed 56V.
The power supply and POE injector look like this installed in their case:
Your 12V supply to the DC-DC converter should be rated for at least 15A (it will not draw that much continuously) so use appropriate size wiring, and a suitable fuse or circuit breaker as close to the power source as possible (this is to protect the wires, not the DC-DC converter.)
The standard Starlink router is not able to run from 12V, and uses a fair bit of power, and has very few features (no VPN support, no guest network etc.) I used a Gl.inet Slate router which runs from 5V (so requires a 12v-5V converter), uses very little power and is based on OpenWRT making it very flexible. It has been working fine for me. Any other router that can run from 12V and has the features you need should work - the interface to Dishy is standard DHCP which is the default configuration for most routers.
To set up the router you need to either have prior networking experience or be able to read the router manual. The main thing you need to know is that the patch cable from the POE injector should be plugged into the router's WAN port, and the router should be configured to expect a DHCP address from the dish.
Although Starlink works almost everywhere, there are occasions where due to e.g. tree cover, some backup is useful. I plugged a Huawei E8372 USB 4G modem into the router for this purpose (with its internal Wi-Fi turned off.) The Slate router can also act as a repeater from another Wi-Fi network. The E8372 does not fit into the Slate router USB socket due to its size, so I used a short USB extension cable and mounted it with a 3D printed bracket - files for that are in this repository.
The () dish seems to average around 30-35W power drain (including losses in the DC-DC converter) - I have heard the [] uses slightly less. The Slate router uses about 6W.