I'm installing the new starlink stuff in it's final location, and that involves drilling a hole in the brickwork to pass the dish<->router cable into the house.
Thing is, the propreitary starlink connectors either end of this cable are massive bulky things which require a hole of almost one inch to pass through.
That might be fine in an USAsian house built mostly of cardboard where you can make such a hole using blunt kitchen utensils, but in a building with double-skin brickwork it's a different matter.
That diameter is beyond anything I have for my SDS, and bigger than I want to drill anyway.
A bit of research shows that the special cable is nothing other than an exterior-grade cat5e shielded twisted pair, and can be cut and spliced using normal network parts and tools, it's just an oddball connector on each end. Wishing to preserve the shield continuity, I go online and find suitable shielded RJ45 plugs and an in-line coupler which will also preserve the continuity. I also needed to get the matching crimp tool. These were VCELiNK brand, because they were available on Amazon for next day delivery. And so I boldly cut the cable.
Never, ever buy these products.
1) They are impossible to make up onto the cable. So you peel back the outer insulation on the cable, exposing the 4 twisted pairs. You then un-twist them, and tease them as straight as you can to remove the wrigglyness in them, then arrange them into the correct order, pinching them in the correct order between thumb and finger. On a regular RJ45, the holes for the wires are at the rear of the plug, and it's easy to pinch the fan of wires into a nice flat straight parallel side-by-side arrangement, with perhaps 3mm of wire ends to poke into the holes of the plug. This is easy. These horrible plugs have the holes deep inside the plug body, perhaps a cm or more, requiring you to pinch the wires about 2cm back from the ends. The wires are too wriggly to remain straight, parallel and in the correct order for that length. It took me close to an hour to get the wires to insert into the holes correctly, without crossing over, bending back, missing a hole in the sequence, putting 2 wires into one hole etc etc.
Starlink cable splice by
Ron Lowe, on Flickr
2) After winning that battle, I hooked it up and turned it on. Download speed test showing 80-90 Mbps, instead of previous 250ish. Log into the diagnostic screen, and the link between the dish and router has degraded from Gigabit to 100Meg. That's consistent with the 80-90Mbit speedtest: You can't shove 250Mbit down a 100Mbit pipe. After eliminating other things, I decide it must be a bad splice. I chop out the splice totally, leaving a short tail of wire each end for later forensics. I grab a straight cat5e IDC jointing box, and punch down both ends of the cable using a normal Krone tool. Bingo: Gigabit link, and 250Mbit speed test.
Starlink cable splice by
Ron Lowe, on Flickr
Forensics: Buzzing out the splice from the wire stubs, I find 3 cores totally open-circuit. One of the blue pair, and both of the brown. I'd crimped these firmly and repeatedly using the manufacturer's own tool, and they had just failed. I've never experienced such BS with a simple network cable ever before.
