They currently have two Starlink units providing internet and voice over IP ability, but one of the units was just ground deployed, and the other isn’t a really great installation. Due to the very tall trees, neither unit was getting great reception, and they both were suffering from poor WiFi strength due to all the trees.
So a plan was hatched to do a nice hard mount of one Starlink on the inverter building with a WiFi repeater to give that part of the camp better WiFi access, and add a WiFi repeater to the other Starlink to boost WiFi access at that location.
My go-to guy when I have questions on stuff like this is @Yarder He has set up a number of things like this for us in the past and we’ve always had great experiences. So a call to him and he picked out some affordable equipment that we would do the physical installation of, then he could come onsite and configure and test.
Here’s what we came up with for mounting the equipment to the inverter building. One upright holds the WiFi repeater, one holds the Starlink dish, and the third will hold a weather station and weather camera.
Inside, we had extra space in the mini server rack that serves the batteries communication hub, so we built a server rack DIN rail bracket to hold everything with room for future components and bolted it in. A dedicated circuit and a power strip were brought into the mini rack to power everything up.
The factory Starlink WiFi unit-which I somehow totally forgot to get pictures of-is mounted directly above the server rack on a nice bracket and still serves the inverters( the inverters are Wi-Fi enabled and talk to a cloud service that allow us to not only monitor all of their activities, but we can program and adjust other parameters remotely) and inside the room communications.
Here’s @Yarder up in everyone’s favorite lift fixing a little termination issue we had.
After a couple hours of work, Yarder had it all up and running with better WiFi coverage than the camp has ever had, and it was time for everyone to head on home for the weekend.
One crazy thing that is happening up here is how fast the fall colors are coming on.
Two weeks ago, everything was green. Last week on our way home, suddenly leaves were turning colors.
And just a week later this past Friday, there were even more colors!
It looks like fall is here in the mountains!
And that means we really have to hustle to get our jobs that are on the books for this year completed before inclement weather shuts us out.
It’s going to be a mad dash to get everything wrapped up over the next couple months!😬😬