Smartlink works Perfectly with StarLink

ShawnQuinn

We live out in the country and have no cable or fiber options for internet. In the past our internet has been expensive Lte hubs.

We have enjoyed Starlink for over a year now, for everything other then remote ham operations.

We recently upgraded Starlink plan from standard Residential to Business Priority 40GB plan. This cost approximately $40 Cdn more then the residential plan. The advantage is it comes with a dynamic public ip address. I have not seen my public ip address change in over 2 months.

It only takes a few days to exhaust 40GB of priority data, then the plan falls back to unlimited standard residential plan, BUT retains the public ip address. Make sure not to select to buy extra priority data that will add up fast at $0.65 per GB.

Steps:

Starlink router placed in bridge mode.

Public address turned on from Starlink app.

Use your router (Netgear Nighthawk RAXE 300) in my case.

At this point you can use Universal Plug and Play or set up port forwarding both work great in my case.

I setup dhcp in the Netgear router on an ip range ( 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.200).

Setup ip reservation on all the Flex radio gear on (192.168.0.205 to 192.168.0.240)

Setup the port forwarding 4994 TCP and 4993 UDP.

No DMZ

Flex gear always boots to the same ip address each time.

Internet Speeds do vary but here is the range:

Latency 30-60ms, Jitter 3-10ms, Download 100-320Mbps, Upload 10-30Mbps.

The on air SSB test have been flawless no packet loss. Starlink has been great during snow and rain storms. Now Starlink customer service is all done through a ticket service, lucky not needed it yet.

In the past I did try Tailscale vpn on my Lte hub, barely worked, Latency was too high and too much packet loss. Solved by a static ip address on Lte hub no vpn required but expensive.

I know other Flex users have posted their success with Starlink and I do agree it works great if you nothing better.

73

Shawn

ve3xyy

widowsson_N6ATC

I'm using the exact same setup, except my network great is Ubiquiti.

Do you have any problems when transmitting on 20 meters? How far is your HF antenna from your Starlink antenna?

When I transmit on 20, it will **** Starlink every time unless I use pretty low power. 80, 40 and other bands are no problem.

ShawnQuinn

Starlink dish and modem are about 100 ft away from HF antenna's, Buried outdoor shielded cat 6 runs through old garden hose to router inside the house. Can run Canadian legal limit 2250watts on all hf bands no issues, But usually only run 4-500 watts.

ShawnQuinn

UPDATE: As of 1 April 2025, Starlink has cancelled the unlimited Business Priority Plans. The Business Priority plans are the only plans that comes with a Public IP address. Now with Business Priority plans once you used your allotment of data 50GB, 500GB, 1 TB etc., the bandwidth is throttled to 1Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up. If you want more high speed data you have to buy more and its gone way up.

The standard Residential plan remains unlimited, but does not have a Public IP address. Its (CGNAT) with a dynamic IP address.

I'm going to mess around a with VPS using OpenVPN, Tailscale with L2TD, or back to 5G cellular hubs with static IP.