Again, it said that it was obstructed. The primary offender was a tree that was the last of a copse near our house that had succumbed to beetle kill. This one was not brown yet, so I had not yet chopped it down, but it had beetle signs on the bark, was close to the house, and would likely fall in that direction on its own in the next few years. I use the past tense, because I cut it down. I managed to fell it perfectly so that it landed in our driveway directly between the house and the garden. When then removed the tree from the drive, and I went on a separate quest to clear paths in our driveway in anticipation of the storm which was already starting to hit (and hit us it did as described in yesterday's post).
I expected StarLink's reception to not be the greatest during the storm but was surprised to see it run about as well as it had before--that is: awesome at times but with intermittent outages. I was also quite impressed that it had almost no snow buildup on the dish itself. Granted, I changed its settings from its default to a preheated setting soon after I started up the dish when it arrived.
Once the skies cleared on Monday, I did a factory reset and a reboot of the StarLink router. We then waited again. After twelve hours it said that it was obstruction free, but it was still having those frequent outages--and LONG searches. A few hours later and it said it was obstructed again (now from two trees that are smaller and also farther back--possibly on our neighbor's property). The outages feel like they have been longer and more frequent than before.
I sent a ticket to StarLink support and received an automated reply. After giving some possible solutions (most of which I did earlier in the week, including relocating my GPS position on the map they provided), it says that "a support associate will be with you shortly," but that was hours ago. Hopefully, I will know more tomorrow.
While I am frustrated with this, I am writing about it as a documentation of the events. I still (perhaps naively) believe that this will work out. I just would have preferred that it did not take so many steps.
On a completely separate note, the drive back from Anchorage was beautiful. We did a there-and-back trip where we discovered the joys of Navi's (our Honda Pilot's) snow setting--it makes a substantial difference.