The user interface

Here I will detail the various tabs and menus of the router user interface.  This includes the by-now-familiar tabs and submenus:

• Online or not online.  This tells you whether the antenna has or has not managed to register to a satellite.
• Visibility.  This brings up the spiffy 3D rendering that tells you whether there have been obstructions blocking the ability of the antenna to maintain connections with satellites.  Hopefully the celestial hemisphere is mostly blue.  If there are patches of red, this indicates places where obstructions happened.
• Stats.  This shows network statistics, including:
  • Uptime, with a graph showing uptime during the most recent ten minutes.
  • Outages, listing all outages lasting longer than 2 seconds during the last ten hours.
  • Latency, with a graph showing latency during the most recent ten minutes.
  • Usage, showing a blue graph (downstream) and a green graph (upstream) during the last ten minutes.
  • Speedtest, showing separate tests from the router to the network, from the client to the network, and from the client to the router.
• Connected devices.  This is a report from the DHCP server letting you know which devices have DHCP IP addresses.  For each device it lets you know which connection method was used (wifi 2.4, wifi 5, or ethernet), the IP address, the MAC address, and in the case of wifi, the signal strength.  I guess it looks up the first few bytes of the MAC address to try to work out the manufacturer of the device.  Green means 2.4 and orange means 5.  This report does not, however, tell you how much DHCP lease time remains.
• Settings.  This includes several sub-settings.
  • Wifi configuration.  This includes fields for renaming the wifi networks, changing the wifi passwords, splitting out the 2.4 and 5 wifis, and turning on WPA3 security.  On my router, none of these fields or settings actually work.  The only way I was able to make any changes to these settings was through tech support.  Lots of things are missing, for example the user does not get to pick the wifi channel or the wifi bandwidth.  The user is not able to choose whether the wifi network is visible or not.
  • Stow Starlink.  In this context, “Starlink” seems to mean “the antenna”.  (I don’t think it means “stow the Starlink corporation”.)  The antenna arrives in its shipping box in a folded-up position.  This button in the user interface instructs the antenna to return to that folded-up position, which is what you would want to do if you ever decide you need to pack up the kit for reshipping.
  • Factory reset.  The button is labeled factory reset which makes you think maybe it would do a factory reset of the entire system.  Nope.  The accompanying text explains that it merely does a reset of the wifi network name and password, and, I guess, by definition, making it so that the 2.4 and 5 networks look like a single wifi network.
  • Advanced.  This provides four buttons:
    • Debug data.  This provides the following details:
      • App
        • this means the user interface app version
      • Router
        • router firmware version
        • router uptime
        • router device ID (a unique ID which in my case is “01” followed by something like twenty zeroes and then five hex characters.
      • Starlink (which I gather means “the antenna”)
        • starlink version (which I gather means antenna firmware version)
        • starlink uptime (which I gather means antenna uptime, which in my case is only a few hours even though the router uptime is several days)
        • starlink device ID (a unique ID which is the letter “u” followed by about twenty zeroes and then five hex characters)
      • Account
        • account name (my name)
        • account account (my account number starting with “ACC”)
    • Wifi debug.  This brings up a new screen which apparently provides very detailed information about the particular wifi network that the mobile app is connected to right now.  So it is telling you about the 5 network or the 2.4 network depending on which one you are connected to at the moment.
    • Reboot wifi.  This is a really stupidly designed button that just runs off and reboots the wifi without asking “are you sure?”
    • Reboot Starlink.  Now that I know that the “reboot wifi” button just runs off and reboots the wifi without asking “are you sure?”, I am scared to push this button.  I am guessing that what it probably does is reboot the router and the antenna, without asking “are you sure?”  In various places in the user interface, they use “Starlink” to sort of mean “the antenna” so I have to assume that here it means “reboot at least the antenna”.
  • Support.  This simply runs off to the “support” FAQs on the Starlink web site.