You guys are right ..you do not need service to fly a drone . But you do need service to live stream from drone camera to either my phone or tablet . To see where the drone sees . At . That . Time . My drone is my scout . My eyes above ground . At the moment . Don't give a chit about social media .

 

No you do not.

 

I think some DJI drones you have to login to your account in order to be able to use your drone or you are capped at 50ft so wifi is needed. It's happened a few times while on work trips.

Also, we use Starlink's on Earthroamer's and they are fantastic. Definitely been in the middle of absolute no where and have the freedoms of being at home using devices. My only concern with installing one in a D2 is the power consumption. Sure you can run it off a power brick but only for a few hours and then you have to spend several hours to charge the brick back up. Kind of a moot point if you ask me

 

Starlink mini consumes between 20-40W which translates to about 1.7 to 3.4A on 12V. My aux battery (100Ah LiFePo) can charge at a rate of 50A when the engine is running, so that is more than 10 times faster than the draw. 3h Internet in the evening translates to about 10Ah or 10% of the battery. I have more power hungry devices on board and this was never a problem.

 

Nice. I think I must be thinking of the older models then - we just started putting on the Roam / Mini ones I think

 

Also do not run the Starlink from a 120VAC inverter, because it is not very efficient. You have losses for converting DC into AC, back to DC and using maybe 10% of the rated power of the inverter. Inverters have their max efficiency of 90-98% at full load only.

 

This will be my last post on this subject . As of early December , Star link launched more satellites into orbit for use for mobile phones . No matter what carrier you have . Phone Home !!!

 

@Tomzsix Not so fast. Data rates are very low, it will work for text messages only and that will be very slow. Due to design limitations and usable bandwidth/frequencies it will never replace a satellite dish.