These are are some notes I put together on butchering the rectangular dishy cable.
FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES AT YOUR OWN RISK. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE OR INJURY YOU SUSTAIN FROM FOLLOWING OR NOT FOLLOWING THESE GUIDELINES.
In general, if you can get away with using the original 75' cable (or the official 150' long replacement cable), then that is ultimately preferable to doing any of this stuff. If you don't already know why you would want to do this then you definitely shouldn't do it. If you run into trouble, the first thing Starlink Support is going to ask is if the cable between your dishy and router has any modifications, and for good reason.
Despite the connectors being proprietary, the underlying technology connecting the router and the rectangular dishy is gigabit ethernet with non-standard PoE(The orange and green pairs are positive, the blue and brown pairs are negative). The cable itself is plain stranded STP CAT5e, suitable for outdoor use. The router acts as a 48V, 2A PoE power supply, so 96 watts are available at the port the router.
Stick with the original router (and possibly the ethernet port dongle) unless you have a good reason to try something else. You cannot power dishy with a standard PoE injector, but if you are enterprising enough you can rearrange the wires (swap blue/green, terminate as Type-B) going into and out-of a passive 4-pair PoE Injector and get it working with a sufficiently large 48V or 52V DC power supply.
Note that most 48V 2A power supplies on Amazon are insufficient! I recommend this 52V power supply, as I have confirmed that it works and I am using it on my own 200+ft run.
Resistance is the primary limiting factor you will run into. As you increase the length of the cable and add additional terminations/connectors, resistance increases. If the resistance is too high, the voltage at the dishy will (perhaps only occasionally) drop too low, causing it to spuriously reboot or not boot at all.
The exact maximum round-trip power resistance that the cable can have before Dishy's stability suffers isn't immediately clear, but 1.8Ω round-trip (~88 watts available for Dishy) appears to be stable while 2.5Ω round-trip is just barely unstable. (neither value includes the resistance of about 20 extra feet of the original CAT5e that is used in my setup)
If you cannot easily measure resistance, you will need to be as conservative as possible:
- Keep the length of your entire run as short as possible and your connectors as few as possible. Continuous runs are almost always preferable to runs with connectors.
- Use outdoor-rated cable for outdoor runs. If riser cable is all you have, paint it.
- Don't directly bury the cable unless it is rated for direct burial. Otherwise, water intrusion will eventually make your connection unreliable. The original cable is NOT rated for direct burial.
- Use 23AWG (or larger) CAT6/CAT6A cable, which will contribute around 0.03Ω/meter for a continuous run.
- The original cable was only 24AWG, so if you are using 23AWG cable then the less length you use from the original cable the better.
- It would appear that connectors will each contribute ~0.02-0.1Ω to the round-trip resistance, but more research is required.
- Avoid unnecessary use of patch panels, they introduce additional connectors and add resistance.
- 150' is likely the most distance you are going to get without changing your approach (like splitting out the power into larger guage wires, etc), but if you use a specialty low-resistance cable (like this) then you might be able to almost double that with some careful terminations.
- Once you get everything set up, try turning on snow pre-heat mode:
- If you can run a few speed tests in a row without problems, then you are likely golden.
- If your dishy reboots (either immediately or after running a few speed tests), your cable resistance is too high.
For longer runs you may need to use a power supply with a larger voltage. I can confirm that the rectangular dishy works fine on 52V.
With a longer run, proper grounding and surge protection becomes more important. Dishy must be grounded in some way. With the unmodified original cable, that grounding comes from the router. Since we are cutting that wire, we need to make sure that we provide that grounding.
- At least the the first RJ45 termination on the dishy side should be a grounded RJ45 plug.
- Use a high-quality, grounded, PoE-compatable ethernet surge
protector at the termination closest to your dishy.
- If you do this at your "service entrance" (where the wire enters your house), then you won't need a shielded ethernet cable after that point---but you might want it to be shielded to reduce RF interference.
- If you do use a shielded cable after the grounded surge protector, make sure you don't have a continuous ground between your surge protector and your Starlink router---that would create a ground loop, and you don't want that. If there is a ground fault, some of the surge current could go through your shielding!
- Alternatively, you could forgo the surge protector and use shielded cables, connectors, and plugs for the entire run and ensure continuity between the starlink router and dishy (presumably the router has some amount of built-in surge protection).
It sounds like you are measuring the current into the router. The power consumption of the router itself should be fairly constant. There will be an extra power draw from the dish, but you can work out the raw power required by the router simply by powering it on with the dish not connected (do not connect or disconnect the dish to a powered on router; this causes a very significant power surge to the dish which is the most likely candidate for frying one or more of the four connectors). See my earlier comment:
https://gist.github.com/darconeous/8c7899c4d2f849b881d6c43be55066ee?permalink_comment_id=4479847#gistcomment-4479847
I got my figures using the Tycon power injector described in this gist (not the router) so I was able to measure the current being sent down the cable. I also put a 2A fuse inline with the power delivery so that limits the short-term average current. The fuse never blew even though there is good reason to believe that there is a startup current/power surge which might be as much as 7A for a (small) fraction of a second (hence my comment about about not connecting a "hot" router to the dish). My detailed measurements start here:
https://gist.github.com/darconeous/8c7899c4d2f849b881d6c43be55066ee?permalink_comment_id=4463407#gistcomment-4463407
If you look at one of the posts that follow:
https://gist.github.com/darconeous/8c7899c4d2f849b881d6c43be55066ee?permalink_comment_id=4466245#gistcomment-4466245
You will see the graph of what actually happens during boot and after. This is using a Fluke 189 logging multimeter, pretty much the industry standard when it was bought for me it but I admit I've owned it for coming on 30 years and never got it recalibrated. The most telling figures might be the ones in the first comment: the dish apparently does consume close to 90W for short periods of time. 90W is the capacity of the router, some injectors can handle more but certainly not all of them.
I believe I left "pre-heat" on after my first post and you can see that the actual dish consumption hits a max of 1.6A but averages somewhere in the range 0.6 to 0.9A. This corresponds to a maximum power of 77W and an average over 5s in the range 29W-43W, consistent with the stated router capabilities.
It's almost impossible to guesstimate the actual power going to the router without a calibration of the router efficiency; the router takes 110-250V input and converts it to its own internal power requirements (5V or 3.3V, probably 5) and the dish requirements (48V). Efficiencies will be in the range 80-90% but the design might be dumb.
Nevertheless whatever excess current is delivered to the router when the dish is connected it is certainly an underestimate of the current going to the dish, because that current is at ~48V.
All the evidence so far is that the design of the dish produces significant surge currents under some circumstances. In particular there is evidence that there might be a very high initial surge if a charged, hot, PoE injector is connected to the dish. This is what I was doing with my Tycon setup and the tester I was using (which I don't trust) reported a 7A surge.
The surge should be no big problem for the components involved because they are mostly passive, maybe all; it's not clear how many diodes StarLink put into the circuit but it sounds like "none", that's one way of getting more power. My own tests prove that in my system the thing that fried was the connection (the connector) at the dish. It fried in a way that is consistent with an instantaneous surge. What caused that surge is impossible to say.