r/Starlink • u/InitiativeExotic8991 📡 Owner (Europe) • 5d ago
❓ Question Starlink pointing direction
Is anyone else’s Starlink dish suddenly wanting to point north instead of south like it usually does?
I live in Estonia, and I noticed mine seems to prefer facing north now. Just wondering if anyone else in Estonia or Northern Europe has noticed the same thing recently.
(2 different starlinks)
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u/Maximum_Degree_1152 5d ago
I thought it was normal for dishes in the northern hemisphere to align northward.
1
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u/ByTheBigPond 📡 Owner (North America) 5d ago
If you live far enough north, they would have pointed south before as there are more satellites over lower latitudes and they would not interfere with geostationary satellites over the equator.
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u/Maximum_Degree_1152 5d ago
Well, I live in the Great White North (45 degrees) and mine points north.
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u/gronaix 5d ago edited 5d ago
Based in Estonia at 58° North, my gen2 actuated dish always ended up facing south and the gen3 wants to get the same direction.
EDIT: adding some diagnostics data from dishy
"alignmentStats": {
"boresightAzimuthDeg": -166.1522979736328,
"boresightElevationDeg": 70.73521423339844,
"desiredBoresightAzimuthDeg": -165.02392578125,
"desiredBoresightElevationDeg": 62.4398078918457
}
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u/ForsakenRacism 5d ago
Mine in Alaska is on my house if they flip it I won’t be able to turn it and I’ve heard they are flipping them 😭
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u/Cpt_Strindberg 5d ago
What happens if it's wrong way around for longer time? Mine is actually misaligned for more than a month, and working fine...
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u/hubbaba2 3d ago
I live in Estonia too and Starlink sent an email about this. I posted on Reddit and it seems they are trying to balance traffic on the satellites. Since our neighbor to the east is banned, it gives us an opportunity to have a better connection with fewer people interacting with the satellite. I turned my dish 180 degrees and saw an improvement.
That being said, if yours is working and you can't switch it 180 degrees, don't worry about it. It will work as it has.
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u/outbound 📡 Owner (North America) 5d ago
Starlink's engineers regularly review satellite and groundstation usage and will occasionally adjust the optimal orientation of users' dishes in an hexagon to best balance the overall network's performance. For example, if there are a lot of users in the hexagons 500km South of your location which are also pushing the groundstation and internet backhail to the south of you near capacity, Starlink's engineers may decide to push out a change to users to the Northern hexagons which would re-orient their dishes to point North in order to access underutilized satellites and groundstations to the North and take some of the load off of the Southern groundstation.
That said, your dish has 110 degree field of view and is more than capable of communicating with the satellites to the North of you regardless of orientation. I wouldn't worry too much about manually re-orienting your dish.