Internet

There are probably countless videos and articles on the internet about getting access to the internet while travelling with a van/campervan/motorhome. We watched some of those and came to the conclusion there is not “best” solution. Most end in the “recommendation” to have both a cellular antenna and router as well as Starlink if you truly want coverage and connectivity anywhere*.

Initially we thought “that’s overkill” and decided to go with just Starlink. It worked pretty well and we generally have few complaints. However, just 1 month in Starlink upped their prices (to 72€/month at the time of writing this article) and we overlooked one very important factor:

Starlink needs an unobstructed view especially for our use case which is a lot of video calls. You can get away with obstructions for uploads, streaming and surfing no problem. But if you do a lot of video calls then any obstruction will make you very unhappy.

Since we don’t always want to stay in the middle of a random field to have an unobstructed view, but we also want to be able to stay in say a a forest area, we decided to beef up our internet setup and add a 5G router as well as a 5G antenna.

Our setup

Starlink V4/3rd Gen (i.e. the “big dish” without self-adjustment and the standard RJ45 connections).
Teltonika RUTC50 5G Router
12V to 48V/56V inverter from LinkGear
YAOSHENG 200W passive POE injector
2 simple power switches
An external RJ45 outlet (professionally installed for free)
Starlink Pivot Mount
5G antenna

Wiring schematics

Simplified schematics; fuses and some details not shown!

The battery delivers 12V to the router as well as the inverter which steps it up to 48V (Starlink requires this voltage). The POE injector adds the power to the ethernet connection going to the Starlink dish. This generation of dish uses a standard RJ45 connector. The LAN port of the POE injector delivers the internet signal via ethernet to the WAN port on the 5G router. Since the modem is built into the dish there is very little configuration required to make this work.

The 5G router is connected to a 5G antenna mounted to the roof of our van. It can hold up to 2 SIMs and you can seamlessly switch between Starlink or cellular internet.

The two power switches control Starlink and the router independently. When we use Starlink we do need both, however, when we run on cellular we can switch Starlink off and save a lot of power.