I want to be straight about my bias before anything else: I like this product a great deal, and I'd have a hard time going back. That doesn't make the installation foolproof, and the failure modes are predictable enough that they're worth spelling out.
The headline, though: I installed mine myself, on my own roof, and it was easy. No installer, no appointment, no truck roll, no scheduling window. If you've ever waited half a day for a cable technician who then couldn't fix the problem, that alone is worth something.
What comes in the box
Less than you'd expect. The dish, a base or mount depending on which kit you ordered, a cable running from dish to router, the router itself, and power. There is no installer appointment, no truck roll, and no technician to blame if you put it in the wrong place — which is both the appeal and the risk.
The obstruction check is the whole job
This is the part I'd underline twice.
Before you mount anything permanently, use the obstruction tool in the Starlink app from the exact spot you're considering. You hold the phone up and sweep it across the sky, and it builds a map of what's blocking the satellites' path. It takes a few minutes and it is the difference between a connection that just works and one that drops out at unpredictable intervals forever.
The trap is that a partially obstructed install mostly works. You'll get good speeds, and then a video call will die for eight seconds, and then it'll be fine again. That pattern is maddening to diagnose after the fact and trivial to prevent beforehand. A tree that clips the edge of the view in September will be worse when it leafs out fully next spring, so judge the site at its worst, not its current state.
Take the extra half hour. Check three or four candidate positions, not one.
Where to mount it — and the decision people regret
You have broadly three options, and they trade off in a predictable way.
| Approach | Works well when | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Ground stand | You have open sky at ground level and want to test before committing. No drilling, fully reversible. | Lowest position means the most obstruction risk. Also the easiest for weather, animals and lawn equipment to interfere with. |
| Roof or eave mount | Trees or structures block the lower sky. Gets the dish above most local obstructions. | Roof penetrations need proper sealing. Anything that fails later means going back up there, in whatever weather it fails in. |
| Pole or mast | You need real height to clear a treeline and want to keep the roof intact. | More hardware, more cost, and the mast has to be genuinely rigid — flex in wind causes exactly the intermittent dropouts you were trying to avoid. |
The regret I hear most often is from people who mounted at ground level because it was easy, discovered a marginal obstruction, and then had to redo the whole cable run to move the dish up. If the obstruction check shows anything at all, go higher the first time.
The cable run is the tedious part
Getting the cable from the dish into the house is the step that takes real time. You need a route that's weather-sealed, doesn't get pinched, and doesn't become the thing that pulls your dish off the roof when something snags it. Plan a drip loop so water runs off the cable rather than down it and into your wall.
Budget more time for this than for everything else combined. The dish will find satellites in minutes; the cable will take you an afternoon if you do it properly.
Weather — the thing I was most wrong about
I expected this to be the weak point. It hasn't been.
Rain fade is a genuine physical effect on any satellite link, and I'm not going to tell you it doesn't exist. But I live on the Chesapeake Bay, we get real storms, and mine keeps working through them. That is not the answer I was braced for when I ordered, and it's the single biggest gap I've found between what people assume about satellite internet and what it actually does.
If your mental model is the old geostationary satellite service that fell over when a cloud looked at it, adjust it. I'd rather report what mine does than repeat a warning I haven't actually experienced.
The dish also has a heating function for snow and ice, which matters more the further north you are. Snow accumulating on a cold dish is a real failure mode; a dish that can melt it off is not.
What I actually get
On the standard Residential plan, roof-mounted in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, I see a consistent 100 Mbps down — including through storms. The word doing the work in that sentence is consistent.
That matters more than a headline number, and it's the thing people who haven't used it don't believe. The old objection to satellite internet was never really the peak speed — it was that the peak was a number you saw once, on a clear Tuesday, and the rest of the time you were somewhere unpredictable below it. What I get is a connection that behaves the same way on an ordinary evening as it does at ten in the morning. I stopped thinking about it, which is the highest compliment I can pay an internet connection.
For context on what that supports: 100 Mbps comfortably handles simultaneous video calls, 4K streaming and a working-from-home household. It is not a gigabit fiber line, and I'm not going to pretend it is. It is also not what I had before, which is the comparison that actually matters out here.
How long it really takes
If you've done the obstruction check and chosen your spot, getting to a working connection is genuinely quick — plug it in, let it orient itself and find the constellation, and you're online. The honest total for a careful permanent roof installation is most of an afternoon, and almost all of that is mounting and cable management rather than anything technical. None of it required a professional.
The part that takes judgement is where to put it. The part that takes time is the cable. The part everyone worries about — the technology — takes care of itself.
Ordering one
Use my referral link and Starlink credits your second month free. You'll want to confirm your address is serviceable first — their site checks it before you order.
Get the free month →One last piece of advice: keep the packaging until you're confident in your mounting position. If the obstruction check turns out to have been optimistic, you'll want to move the dish, and the original box makes that much easier.