We live in sort of a low hollow area in our semi-rural desert home with rising terrain to the north and a couple of places towards the southwest. Even under conditions of placing the Starlink Mini dish on the roof of the house, we would have a limited view of the sky. That being said, I did not want to climb up on the roof to put the dish up there, so I placed it on the spa in the Arizona Room (screened-in patio) by the RV Drive behind the house. Due to the limited sky view from the patio, the Starlink App reports the following 3-D graphic of the obstructions the unit “sees.”
The “dish,” in reality, is a planar phased array antenna which scans the sky for satellite signals and plots the areas blocked by obstructions. The App admonishes that the map of obstructions is collected over several hours and should be stable-ish after a while. The map shown has been integrated over the last day or so with the current antenna placement. Blue equals clear sky shot and red is obstructed. The white square is the antenna. I estimate clear sky to be no more than 35-40 percent of the dome. Regardless of the overwhelming obstructions, the system can deliver the performance seen in the OOKLA download rate seen below.
That rate is sufficient to do most internet streaming services, but may not perform as well for interactive gaming or other similar stuff for which we have no need. There is a caveat on the megabit performance shown; the satellite constellation is on the move and the performance (rate) may suffer as things go in and out of range, so some buffering (delays) may be possible.
Another note of interest: during the past few weeks, our Cox Internet Cable has gone down for several hours at a time. With the (approximate) setup shown in the top image, we continued internet service in spite of the outages on the cable.
We should do OK on the road with all of our internet needs as we take off for a nice long RV excursion in a few weeks.
This is not a paid plug, but I notice that the Starlink Mini is on sale for 40 percent off or so ($299 vs $499).