Starlink Obstructions: How to Check, Fix and Cost Them

By the Starlink News technical desk · Published 19 September 2026 · Last reviewed 19 September 2026 · Editorial standards, sourcing and corrections policy · Corrections: corrections@starlink-news.com

How this guide was produced. Every specification here is traced to a primary document and linked, so you can check us rather than trust us: terminal specs and mounting guidance from Starlink’s support and installation documentation and SpaceX’s filings in the FCC equipment authorization database; structural and legal constraints from the relevant regulator or standards body, linked at the point of use. We do not run a radio lab, so we publish no measurements we did not take — but we did work through the app-side procedure in this guide by hand, and that walkthrough is reported in its own section below. Where a site is modelled, it is labelled a model. The corrections log at the foot records every change with its date.

A Starlink obstruction is any solid object — a branch, a chimney, a ridgeline, a neighbouring roof — sitting between your dish and the satellite it is tracking at that instant. The fix is nearly always mechanical rather than technical: scan the sky with the Starlink app at the exact spot you intend to mount, then raise or move the terminal until the app reports a clear field of view. Starlink specifies a minimum of 100° of unobstructed sky, with roughly 140° recommended for consistent performance, and the gap between a site that meets that and one that misses it by a single treeline is the gap between a stable connection and a dozen dropouts an hour.

What follows is the full diagnostic and remediation path: the app scan, the colour map, the trigonometry that sizes a pole correctly, latitude effects, what each class of fix costs, and the point at which a site is simply not viable. The physics are identical in Manitoba, Mpumalanga and Mindanao. The rules about trimming trees and drilling roofs are not, and those differences are flagged where they matter.

• Target: obstruction time below 1% of a 24-hour period.
• Warning zone: above 2% triggers a performance degradation notice in the app.
• Escalation: above 5% is the practical threshold for opening a Starlink support ticket.
• Cheapest fix first: move the dish, then raise it, then trim, then call an installer.
• Check availability before you spend: a perfect sky view is worthless in a cell that is sold out.

What Causes Starlink Obstructions and Why They Matter

Starlink operates in the Ku band, and Ku-band signals do not bend around objects or pass through wet foliage. When a satellite the terminal is locked to crosses behind a branch, the link degrades within milliseconds and the terminal must hand over to another satellite — a handover it cannot complete instantly if the replacement is also behind something. The result is a dropout measured in seconds, not minutes, which is why obstructed installations often test fine on a speed check and still ruin a video call.

How much sky view does Starlink need? The user terminal requires approximately 100° of clear field of view as an absolute minimum, and around 140° for optimal performance. That cone is not centred on straight-up: the terminal biases its coverage toward the pole in each hemisphere, which is why an obstruction to the north matters more in Norway or Nova Scotia than the same obstruction to the south.

How the terminal detects an obstruction

The dish does not see obstructions optically. It infers them from its own behaviour, combining accelerometer data — which tells it how it is oriented and tilted — with logged signal-to-noise degradation across the sky it has already scanned. Over the first several hours of operation it builds a map of which directions reliably deliver signal and which do not, then displays that map as the obstruction view in the app.

Two consequences follow. The map improves in accuracy over about twelve hours of continuous operation, so an early reading is provisional. And if you physically move or re-aim the dish, reset the obstruction data so the terminal rebuilds from scratch rather than blending old geometry with new. Blended maps are the single most common reason a genuinely successful relocation appears to have changed nothing — the reading is an average of where the dish used to be and where it is now.

Why dropouts feel worse than the percentage suggests

A site running 2% obstruction is not offline for 29 continuous minutes a day. The Statistics page logs each event with a timestamp, and what you actually have is one or two seconds of loss, several hundred times a day, scattered unevenly. TCP recovers from that pattern. Real-time protocols — voice, video, gaming, remote desktop — do not.

You will see throughput-loss percentages quoted on forums for obstructed sites. We do not repeat them, because none of them publish a methodology and none are reproducible. What is mechanically certain is the direction and the cause: every dropout forces TCP congestion control to collapse its window and ramp back up, so the throughput penalty of an obstructed site is disproportionately larger than its obstruction percentage, and it is worst when the cell is busiest because recovery competes with everyone else’s traffic. If you want a number for your own site, measure it. Run a speed test at 11:00 and again at 20:00 local time on the same day, and compare the gap against an unobstructed terminal in the same cell if a neighbour will let you. That comparison is worth more than any published average.

Hardware generation matters

The discontinued Gen 1 round dish had a narrower field of view and a motorised base that physically re-aimed itself. The current Gen 2 rectangular terminal sees a wider slice of sky and adjusts elevation automatically between roughly 25° and 60°. Owners upgrading from Gen 1 sometimes find a marginal site becomes acceptable purely on the hardware change, with no mount work at all. If you have not set the kit up yet, work through How to Install and Set Up Your Starlink Kit: Step-by-Step Guide first — obstruction planning assumes you already know how the terminal, cable, grounding and router physically connect.

How to Check for Obstructions Using the Starlink App

The obstruction tool sits on the home screen of the Starlink app for iOS and Android, behind a button labelled FIND AN INSTALL LOCATION, and it runs without a kit, an account or an active subscription. That makes it the most useful thing you can do before buying anything: stand in the garden, scan the sky, and know within three minutes whether the site is viable.

The scan, step by step

1. Install the Starlink app and open it. Tap FIND AN INSTALL LOCATION — no login required.
2. Grant camera access. The app overlays a virtual sky dome on the live camera feed and asks you to pan across it.
3. Stand where the dish will stand, at the height the dish will sit. For a roof or pole mount, get on the roof, or tape the phone to an extended painter’s pole. A scan done at ground level under a tree tells you nothing about a mount 4 m above it.
4. Sweep slowly across the full dome until every segment is filled in. Rushing leaves gaps the app treats as unknown rather than clear.
5. Read the result: a percentage of blocked field of view, plus a colour map showing where the blockage sits.
6. Screenshot every scan and rename the file with the position and height. You will be comparing four or five of them later, and from memory they all look the same.
7. Repeat at two or three candidate positions. The difference between the poleward corner of a roof and the equator-facing one is frequently the whole answer.

What the colours mean

Red zones indicate complete signal blockage — satellites passing through them are unusable. Darker or black shading indicates intermittent obstruction, where something thin or moving, such as a bare branch or a power line, interrupts the link some of the time. Clear sky renders unshaded. A thin red band low on one horizon is usually survivable; red intruding toward the centre of the dome, or concentrated on the poleward side, is not.

What we found running the tool ourselves

On 19 September 2026 the desk worked through the install-location flow on both iOS and Android at a single suburban test spot, partly to confirm the procedure above and partly because two of the failure modes owners report are easiest to understand by provoking them. This was one site on one day, not a controlled trial, and the numbers it produced are specific to that garden — but three observations generalise.

Height changes the answer more than position does, and it does so abruptly. Scanned at standing height beside a hedge and a two-storey wall, the dome came back with a broad blocked band across most of one side. The same spot scanned from the top of a ladder, roughly 4 m up, cleared the great majority of that band — not because the hedge had moved, but because raising the sensor dropped it below the working cone. If you take one habit from this guide, take the ladder.

The augmented-reality overlay drifts in poor light. Repeating the scan at dusk, the sky dome visibly slid against the real horizon and returned a materially different map from the daylight scan at the same spot. Both Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore need visual features in the frame to hold a pose, and a plain grey sky gives them almost nothing. Scan in daylight, keep a fence line or roof edge in frame while you pan, and re-run any implausible result before acting on it.

Partial sweeps flatter the site. Stopping the pan early produced a lower blocked percentage than completing it, because unscanned sky is not counted as blocked. Any reading obtained in under about a minute should be discarded.

The fourth failure mode we could not provoke in a day: seasonality. The app maps the sky as it is on the day you scan, and in temperate latitudes a bare-branch winter reading understates summer obstruction. That is the next section’s problem.

Common Obstruction Sources by Installation Environment

Obstruction sources cluster by environment, and identifying which one you are facing determines whether the fix costs nothing, a few hundred dollars, or is impossible at any price.

Vegetation

Can trees block Starlink? Yes — they are the dominant cause worldwide. Ku-band signals are absorbed by leaves and especially by the water held on and in them, so a tree that is semi-transparent in January can be solid in July.

How large that seasonal swing is, nobody has measured publicly. Percentage figures circulate in installer posts and owner forums; we have removed the one this guide previously carried, because we could find no methodology behind it and a number without a method is worse than no number at all. The operating rule needs no figure: scan in leaf-on season, or treat a winter reading as optimistic and re-scan after leaf-out. Deciduous canopy close to the dish is where the swing is largest; a bare stand 40 m away will barely change.

Evergreen and tropical canopies offer no seasonal relief at all; a stand of pines or a mango tree is a year-round wall. Rain makes both cases worse, which is why users in the wet tropics — Queensland, Kerala, the Congo basin — report obstruction-linked dropouts clustering in the wet season with no change to the installation.

Buildings, terrain and your own house

The practical geometry rule for anything within about 45° of the horizon is keep the dish at least twice the obstruction’s height away from it, measured horizontally. A 6 m tree therefore needs 12 m of clearance, or the dish needs to go above it. That rule is not folklore: a 2:1 ratio places the top of the obstruction at arctan(0.5) ≈ 26.6° of elevation, just above the roughly 25° minimum the Gen 2 terminal works down to. It is the rule-of-thumb version of the trigonometry in the next section.

Terrain follows the same logic but cannot be trimmed. A valley floor in the Alps, the Andes or the Scottish Highlands can lose a large share of its sky to the valley walls regardless of mounting height. We do not publish a figure for how large, because the only honest one is what your own app scan returns from the actual floor of your actual valley — and the direction is all you need: no pole solves a mountain. If the poleward wall rises above about 25° from your position, the site is constrained by geology and the decision is whether the remaining sky is enough, not how tall a mast to buy.

Your own house is the obstruction people forget. A dish placed at eave level on the equator-facing side of a two-storey building, in a hemisphere where the terminal wants to look poleward, is aiming straight at its own roof. Walk the building before you walk the treeline.

Metal, and the problem that is not blockage

Metal roofs, steel sheds, grain silos and reflective cladding create a different fault: multipath interference. The signal arrives both directly and as a reflection a few nanoseconds later, and the terminal reads the combination as noise. Multipath does not always register clearly on the obstruction map, which makes it a frequent cause of the complaint that the app shows 0% obstruction while the connection still stutters. The remedy is distance and angle — move the dish off the metal plane, ideally onto a pole standing clear of it, rather than bolting it flat to the sheet.

Environment	Dominant blocker	Usual fix
Temperate forest (US Midwest, central Europe)	Deciduous canopy, seasonal	Pole mount 3–5 m, or relocate to a clearing
Tropical / wet tropics	Dense evergreen canopy, rain-loaded foliage	Above-canopy mast, long cable run
Dense urban	Adjacent buildings, parapets, plant rooms	Roof edge or parapet mount; building consent
Agricultural / industrial	Metal sheds, silos — multipath	Standoff pole clear of metal surfaces
Alpine / valley	Terrain horizon	Often unfixable; relocate site entirely
High latitude (above 55°)	Low-elevation poleward horizon	Maximise poleward clearance, elevate mount

Mounting Height and Location: Finding Clear Line of Sight

Height is the lever that converts a marginal site into a good one, and cable length is what limits it. The Gen 2 Standard kit ships with a 15 m (49.2 ft) cable, and a 45.7 m (150 ft) extension is sold separately — which is what makes a detached pole in a clearing, 40 m from the house, a realistic option rather than a fantasy.

Measure it yourself: the five-minute clinometer protocol

Almost every wasted purchase in this field starts with somebody buying a pole before working out what angle they needed to beat. The arithmetic takes five minutes and needs nothing but a phone. Any free clinometer app will do; most phones ship with one inside the compass or measure utility.

1. Stand at the proposed dish position, at the proposed dish height. Sight the clinometer at the top of the obstruction. Write down the angle.
2. Measure the horizontal distance to the obstruction — pace it, tape it, or use a mapping app’s measure tool.
3. Compute the obstruction’s height above the dish: distance × tan(angle).
4. Pick a target elevation angle to clear it to. Use 25° to put the obstruction entirely outside the terminal’s working cone; 15° if you are trying to buy back the low-elevation band that high-latitude and marginal sites depend on.
5. Compute the pole height you need: obstruction height above dish − (distance × tan(target angle)). If the answer is negative you already clear it, and the problem is elsewhere on the dome.

The table below runs that formula for a single obstruction standing 8 m above the dish base, to show how brutally distance dominates height. Doubling your distance from the treeline is almost always cheaper than doubling your mast.

Horizontal distance to obstruction	Elevation angle of its top	Verdict for a Gen 2 terminal
10 m	38.7°	Deep inside the working cone — unusable band
16 m (the 2:1 rule)	26.6°	Marginal; sits right on the ~25° floor
20 m	21.8°	Clears the cone; still eats low-elevation passes
30 m	14.9°	Comfortable at mid latitudes
40 m	11.3°	Acceptable even at high latitude

Geometric calculation from stated assumptions, not a measured installation. Confirm any planning figure with an app scan at the real mounting height before buying hardware.

A worked model: clearing beats pole

Illustrative model, not a logged installation. Take a house in a small clearing, ringed at about 20 m by 12 m deciduous woodland, with the dish on a roof-eave bracket 4 m above the ground. The treeline sits roughly 8 m above the dish at 20 m out, putting the canopy top at about 22° above the horizon all the way round — a ring of blockage across exactly the low-elevation band a mid-latitude terminal relies on.

Now move the same dish 15 m across the clearing, away from the poleward treeline, and put it on a 4.5 m pole. Those trees are now about 35 m distant and the dish is half a metre higher, dropping that horizon to roughly 12°. The gain comes from the lateral move at least as much as from the height, and that is the point people miss: they fixate on the pole and forget the clearing. Note also what the move does not fix — the equator-facing treeline is still at 22°, and that is fine, because it is the half of the sky the terminal cares least about.

Pole specification

Specification matters more than length. Starlink’s pole mount hardware is designed around 2-inch outer diameter pipe with a minimum 2.5 mm wall thickness, and thinner tube flexes in wind. A swaying dish generates intermittent obstruction readings that are really pointing errors, and chasing them with more height makes it worse rather than better. Anything above roughly 3 m of unsupported pipe should be guyed at three points or replaced with a braced tripod or lattice section.

Roof, ground or pole?

• Roof mount: best sky view, worst access. Penetrating mounts need correct flashing; in high-wind regions the fixing must be rated to local code — ASCE 7 in the United States, Eurocode 1 Part 1-4 across the EU and UK, AS/NZS 1170.2 in Australia and New Zealand.
• Ground pole: easiest to service, easiest to guy, usually needs the extension cable. Set in concrete below the local frost line where that applies, and leave a drip loop at the terminal end of the cable.
• Wall or J-mount: quick, but inherits the building’s own shadow — only viable on the poleward face in most of the world.

Angle: you do not set it

The Gen 2 terminal aims itself. It powers up, finds satellites and settles into an elevation somewhere in its automatic range of roughly 25° to 60°, the exact angle determined by your latitude. There is no manual pointing, no elevation table, no azimuth to dial in. Your job is a level, rigid base and clear sky; its job is everything after that. The exception is the Flat High Performance terminal, which has no motors and must be aligned correctly at installation and then left alone.

Latitude, Field of View and Satellite Coverage Patterns

Two sites with identical obstruction maps can perform very differently if one is in Ecuador and the other in Iceland, because satellite density overhead is a function of latitude and of which orbital shells SpaceX has populated.

Where the terminal looks

Starlink’s main shells sit at inclinations that concentrate passes toward the poles relative to a mid-latitude observer. In the Northern Hemisphere the terminal biases its field of view northward; in the Southern Hemisphere, southward. The practical rule: an obstruction on the poleward side costs you far more than an identical one on the equator-facing side. Choosing between two mounting spots, check which has the cleaner poleward horizon — it is usually the deciding factor and the thing most self-installers get backwards.

Why high latitudes are less forgiving

Above roughly 55° north or south — Anchorage, Reykjavik, Tromsø, southern Patagonia — usable satellites appear at lower elevation angles and the gaps between good passes lengthen. A low horizon obstruction that is irrelevant in Nairobi becomes decisive in Yellowknife, because that is precisely the strip of sky the terminal depends on. High-latitude installers should treat the 140° recommendation as a requirement rather than a nicety, and prioritise a completely clean poleward horizon even at the cost of a longer cable run. In the clinometer protocol above, this is the case where you target 15° rather than 25°.

Polar coverage keeps improving as higher-inclination shells fill out, but genuinely polar sites should verify current status on the official availability map before committing to hardware — the position there changes faster than any guide can track, and our running Starlink availability coverage logs the notable changes as they happen.

How many satellites are actually up there

Any count printed in an article is stale by the time it is read, so here it is with the date attached. Independent trackers deriving their figures from US Space Force orbital data — Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink statistics pages and the CelesTrak catalogue are the two most commonly cited — showed the operational constellation in the region of 8,000 satellites during the first half of 2026, against roughly 7,000 a year earlier and about 5,500 in late 2024 (all figures as read in September 2026).

Why it matters for obstructions: a denser constellation means more candidate satellites in any patch of sky, so a marginal site tends to improve slightly over time without you touching it. A site that measured 3% obstruction two years ago may measure a little less today. That is a reason to re-scan an old installation before assuming nothing has changed. It is not a reason to accept a bad site now.

What Obstruction Fixes Cost — and How They Sit Against Your Starlink Price

Obstruction is a property of your site, not a service tier, so clearing it does not change what you pay each month. It does carry its own one-off bill, and the sensible way to think about it is as an addition to the hardware line rather than to the subscription.

We are not publishing a currency band for installer labour. The figure this guide previously carried was drawn from advertised rates rather than any survey, and labour costs differ by an order of magnitude between markets, which makes a single global range actively misleading. What holds everywhere is the ordering, and the ordering is what actually drives good decisions:

• Relocating within the supplied 15 m cable: free, an afternoon’s work, and the highest-yield step on the list. Do this before costing anything else.
• The 45.7 m (150 ft) extension cable: an accessory purchase, small against the kit price. Check the Starlink shop page for your country, as accessory pricing has been revised more than once.
• Pole or pipe mount, plus pipe, concrete and guys: broadly the same order as the extension cable, more for a braced tripod or telescoping mast.
• Professional roof or mast work: almost always the largest line, and the one that varies most between countries. Get two local written quotes rather than trusting any published range, and make sure both specify the wind-load standard being worked to.
• Tree work: the widest range of all, dependent on species, size, access and permits. Routinely the most expensive option and always the least reversible.

Set that against the subscription. Starlink pricing varies by country and tier more than most providers’, and SpaceX has repeatedly discounted or waived hardware in capacity-rich cells while charging full price in congested ones — so two households 50 km apart can legitimately be quoted very different numbers for the same kit. The current figure for your address is whatever the shop page shows when you enter it, and nothing else; our Starlink pricing coverage tracks the changes as they land. If you are weighing Residential against Roam, or thinking about pausing seasonally, the tier structure is unpicked in Starlink service flexibility: weekly plans, Roam options and real-world performance.

Check availability before you check the sky

Availability and obstruction are separate tests and people conflate them constantly. The map answers whether SpaceX is licensed in your country and has spare capacity in your cell; the app’s obstruction tool answers whether your patch of ground can see enough sky. Cells show as available, waitlisted or sold out, and some are open only to Roam or business plans while residential capacity is constrained. Enter the address on the availability map first. There is no sense costing a 5 m guyed mast for a cell that is not selling the plan you want — and equally, if the map says available and the app says 8% obstruction, the constraint is your treeline, not SpaceX.

When to Relocate: Mitigation vs. Impossible Sites

The threshold is 2%. When obstruction-related downtime exceeds 2% of a 24-hour period the app raises a performance degradation warning, and that is where tinkering stops paying and the site needs a structural answer. Below 1%, leave it alone. Between 1% and 2%, monitor across a season before spending money — a June reading and a January reading are different readings.

The decision sequence

Work it in this order and stop at the first step that gets you under 1%. Each step costs more and undoes less than the one before it.

1. Move the dish laterally. Free. Scan three alternative spots at realistic mounting height, screenshot each, and compare the poleward half of the map specifically rather than the headline percentage — two positions can both read 4% while one has its blockage in the half of the sky that matters. This step solves more cases than everything below it combined.
2. Raise it. Pole mount at 3–5 m, plus the extension cable if the clear spot is away from the house. Run the clinometer protocol before buying pipe and work out the angle you need to beat. Buying a 3 m pole for a problem that needs 5 m is the commonest wasted purchase in this whole exercise.
3. Trim. Only after the first two fail, only where lawful, and only if the tree is yours. You are buying a fix with a shelf life: a canopy trimmed today grows back into the same cone within a few seasons, so plan for repeat trimming or an eventual pole.
4. Bring in a professional. Worth it for roof penetrations in high-wind regions, ballast calculations, anything above ladder height, and any site where a fall would be serious. Ask which wind-load standard they are working to; if they cannot name one, they are guessing.
5. Accept the site is unfit. Valley floors, dense multi-storey urban cores and sites whose only clear sky belongs to a neighbour sometimes have no answer at any price. The honest stop rule: if two relocations and one height increase have not brought you under 2%, stop spending and reconsider the site, the terminal type, or the service.

Cutting trees: check before you cut

Tree removal is regulated almost everywhere and the rules are local, not national. In England and Wales a Tree Preservation Order or conservation-area designation makes unauthorised works a criminal offence — the UK government guidance on Tree Preservation Orders sets out the process and the penalties. Many Australian and New Zealand councils protect significant trees by schedule. Canadian municipalities routinely require permits above a diameter threshold, and provincial rather than federal rules govern the work: the CRTC regulates telecommunications carriage, not what you do to a maple in your garden. Across the EU, protected species and nesting-season rules can bar work irrespective of who owns the tree. Ask the local authority first; the fine will exceed the cost of a taller pole.

Renters, and when a compromised site is acceptable

Structural mounting on a rented property needs written landlord consent in most jurisdictions, and many tenancy agreements prohibit roof penetrations outright. Non-penetrating ballasted mounts and freestanding ground poles are the usual workaround; the compact Mini terminal is the fallback where nothing can be fixed to the building.

Some deployments trade obstruction tolerance away deliberately. Emergency and temporary installations, covered in Starlink in Disaster Relief: Hurricane and Conflict Zone Connectivity, routinely accept a few percent obstruction because a degraded link in the first hour beats a perfect link on day three. A permanent home connection is not in that trade-off and should not pretend to be.

Advanced Mounting Solutions for Challenging Sites

When relocation and a standard pole are exhausted, the options get more structural — and more code-bound.

Roof and mast hardware

J-mounts bolt to a fascia or wall and are fast, but they cantilever the load and are only as good as what they are screwed into. Non-penetrating ballasted mounts sit on a flat roof under concrete blocks and avoid membrane damage, which matters on commercial and rented buildings — but their wind rating depends entirely on ballast mass, and that calculation must be done against local wind-loading codes, not guessed. On exposed coastal and cyclone-prone sites, get the ballast figure from an engineer in writing and keep it with your insurance paperwork.

What is the longest pole you can use? There is no Starlink-published limit, because the constraint is structural rather than electronic. Roughly 3 m of unsupported 2-inch pipe is the practical ceiling before deflection starts producing pointing errors in wind; beyond that, guy the mast at three points at about two-thirds height, or move to a braced tripod or telescoping antenna mast. Cable loss is not the limiting factor within the supplied and extension lengths.

Choosing a different terminal

The Flat High Performance terminal is not self-orienting. It has no motors, mounts fixed and must be aligned precisely at installation. Its value at difficult sites is a wider effective field of view and better performance at low elevation angles — genuinely useful above 55° latitude — but it demands a permanent, rigid, correctly aimed installation, is unforgiving of a sloppy mount, and costs several times the Standard kit. It answers a genuinely constrained horizon, not a treeline you could have trimmed.

The Mini terminal, launched in 2024, is the opposite trade: smaller, lighter and portable, with a narrower field of view — Starlink’s published figure is in the region of 100°, and the current spec sheet should be checked before relying on it. That narrower cone makes the Mini a poor obstruction remedy: put it at an obstructed site and it will do worse, not better. Its case is mobility and low-power portable use, and its pricing has moved repeatedly since launch in every market, so quote it from the shop page rather than from any article, this one included.

Third-party mounts and warranty

Third-party brackets are widely used and mostly fine, with one caveat worth stating plainly: if a non-certified mount causes damage to the terminal, that damage is not covered. Starlink supports its own certified mounting hardware; anything else puts the structural risk on you. For a 4 m mast in a windy location, the cost difference between a certified mount and a generic one is trivial against the cost of a terminal on the ground.

Verifying Fix Success: Monitoring After Installation

A fix is proven by data, not by the connection feeling better. Confirmation bias after a hard morning on a ladder is real. After any relocation, re-aim or new mount: screenshot the old statistics, reset the obstruction data so the terminal rebuilds its sky map from scratch, then leave it alone and read the numbers.

A seven-day verification routine

1. Before you touch anything: capture the existing obstruction map and the 7-day graph. Resetting wipes the history you will want to compare against, and without a baseline you cannot tell a real improvement from a quiet week of weather.
2. Hour 0: reset obstruction statistics immediately after the physical change, not before it.
3. Hour 12: first meaningful reading, now built from a full range of satellite passes. Treat it as provisional and resist moving the dish again on the strength of it.
4. Day 1: check the 24-hour graph. Below 1% is the target; 1–2% is tolerable; above 2% means the fix has not worked and the next step in the decision sequence applies.
5. Days 2–7: read the 7-day history and look for clustering. Obstruction concentrated at particular times of day almost always means one blocked corridor crossed by repeating ground tracks, rather than general clutter — and that tells you which side of the dish to work on.
6. Throughout: run speed tests during peak evening hours and correlate them against logged dropout events. A clean obstruction percentage paired with poor peak throughput points at cell congestion, not at your trees, and no amount of mast fixes congestion.
7. Weather check: note whether the verification week was unusually dry. Wet foliage blocks more than dry foliage, so a rain-free week flatters a tree-bound site.
8. Seasonally: in temperate zones, diary a re-check after leaf-out. A site verified in February can fail in June, and the failure arrives as a mystery rather than a known risk if you have not written it down.

Reading the statistics honestly

The Statistics page gives timestamped Obstructed events alongside 24-hour and 7-day history graphs. The number to watch is total obstructed time as a share of the period. Sub-1% is a healthy installation. Persistent readings above 2% mean more work.

Above 5%, escalate. Open a ticket through the Starlink Official Support Center, attach the obstruction map screenshot and the 7-day graph, and state what you have already tried and at what heights. Support will not send anyone to trim your oak, but they will confirm whether the readings indicate a terminal fault rather than geometry — a distinction worth establishing before you pay for a mast.

Seven days is the minimum honest monitoring window before deciding to relocate again. Anything shorter and you are reading noise; anything longer and you are tolerating a bad connection for no reason. More step-by-step material sits in our Starlink guides and how-tos.

Sources, Methodology and Corrections Log

• Primary sources: the Starlink Official Support Center for obstruction, mounting and installation documentation and terminal spec sheets; the FCC equipment authorization (FCC ID) database; the availability map and country shop pages for coverage and pricing.
• Regulatory and structural sources: Ofcom (UK), the ACMA (Australia), the CRTC (Canada — noting installation practice there falls under provincial electrical and building codes, not CRTC remit), UK Tree Preservation Order guidance, and wind-loading standards ASCE 7, Eurocode 1 Part 1-4 and AS/NZS 1170.2.
• Satellite counts: independent orbital trackers derived from US Space Force data — Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink statistics and CelesTrak — read September 2026.
• First-hand work: the app walkthrough reported above was carried out by the desk on 19 September 2026 on iOS and Android at one suburban site, comparing a standing-height scan, a ladder-height scan at the same position, and a repeat scan at dusk. It is a procedural check, not a controlled measurement, and no site-specific percentages from it are published.
• What is modelled rather than measured: the clearing-and-pole example and the distance/elevation table are geometric models built from stated assumptions. They demonstrate the method; they are not numbers to quote for your own site.
• What we do not claim: no throughput-degradation percentages for obstructed sites, no seasonal leaf-on swing figure, no valley sky-loss figure and no installer price band — in each case we could find no reproducible methodology behind the numbers in circulation. Measure your own and compare peak against off-peak.
• Verify before relying on: current satellite count, polar shell status, Mini field-of-view specification, cell availability at your address, and regional hardware and subscription pricing — all of which change on SpaceX’s schedule, not a publication’s.
• Who wrote this: the Starlink News technical desk, an editorial team that sources to primary documents and tests what it can test without a radio lab. Sourcing rules, review process and conflict-of-interest policy are at Editorial standards. Structural, electrical and tree-work guidance here is general information, not a substitute for a qualified local engineer, electrician or arborist.
• Corrections log — 19 September 2026: pre-publication review removed three widely repeated percentage figures that this draft had carried — a 15–30% leaf-on/leaf-off swing in usable sky, a 30–40% sky loss for steep valleys, and a US$150–400 professional installation band. None had a traceable methodology, and each has been replaced with directional guidance plus an instruction to measure or quote locally. Future corrections will be listed here with their date and the text they replaced. If you have solved an obstructed site and are willing to share before-and-after scans with heights and distances, send them to corrections@starlink-news.com and we will publish verified cases with attribution.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Starlink if I have trees around my house?

Usually yes, but which trees matter more than how many. A hedge on the equator-facing side of the dish is close to harmless; a single mature trunk on the poleward side, or anything standing near-overhead, can cost you more than an entire distant treeline. Work out your poleward direction first (north of the equator the terminal leans north, south of it south), then judge the trees in that arc. Two practical traps: a tree you do not own turns an engineering problem into a negotiation, so price a taller mast before you price an arborist; and a canopy trimmed back into clearance grows into the same cone again within a few seasons, so a trim is a lease, not a purchase. If the trees are evergreen or tropical you get no seasonal relief at all, and wet foliage blocks more than dry, so judge the site on a rainy day in the growing season rather than a dry one in winter.

How do I check for obstructions before I buy Starlink?

The obstruction tool in the Starlink app works with no kit, no account and no subscription, which makes it a free pre-purchase test — including on a property you are only viewing. Two things make the difference between a useful scan and a misleading one. First, height: tape your phone to an extended painter’s pole or stand on a ladder at the height the dish would actually occupy, because a scan taken at chest height under a canopy tells you nothing about a mount four metres above it. Second, completeness: the app marks unscanned segments as unknown rather than clear, so a headline reading of 0% obtained from a lazy half-sweep is worthless. Pan until every segment of the dome is filled in, screenshot the result, and repeat at two or three candidate positions. Then check the same address on Starlink’s availability map before you plan any hardware.

What does the red area on the Starlink obstruction map mean?

Red is sky the terminal has learned it cannot use at all; darker shading is intermittent loss. The more useful question is what to do when the map shows almost no red and the connection still stutters, because that is a common and confusing case. Three causes account for most of it. Multipath from a nearby metal roof or silo arrives as noise rather than as blockage, so it rarely draws red. A mast that flexes in wind produces pointing errors that look like random micro-dropouts. And a stale map blended from a previous dish position under-reports the current one. Reset the obstruction data after any physical change, check the mast for sway on a windy day, and remember the map is a record of where signal has been lost historically, not a prediction of where it will be lost next.

How high does a Starlink dish need to be mounted?

There is no published number because it is geometry, not a specification. Measure the elevation angle to the top of the obstruction with a free clinometer app from the proposed dish position, then compute the pole height you need as: obstruction height above the dish minus (horizontal distance x tan of your target angle). Target 25 degrees to push the obstruction outside the terminal’s working cone entirely, or 15 degrees if you are at high latitude and need the low passes. Two cautions that catch people out. Wind load rises sharply with height and with any flex in the pipe, so a taller mast is not a free upgrade — anything above roughly three metres of unsupported 2-inch pipe wants guys at three points or a braced tripod. And moving the dish away from the obstruction almost always buys more angle per dollar than raising it, so run the numbers for both before you buy anything.

Will Starlink work if I can only see part of the sky?

It depends entirely on which part. Starlink needs roughly 100 degrees of clear view as a minimum and works best with around 140, but a gap on the equator-facing side costs far less than the same gap poleward, because that is not where the traffic is. Symptoms tell you which you have: obstruction events scattered evenly through the day usually mean general clutter such as a ring of canopy, while events clustering at the same times each day mean one blocked corridor that repeating ground tracks keep crossing — and that is fixable by moving the dish a few metres, because you know which side to work on. Read the 7-day graph in the Statistics page for the pattern rather than fixating on the headline percentage.

Can I move my Starlink dish to a different location?

Moving it around your own property is free and is the highest-yield fix available; Starlink’s own guidance is to change position before doing structural work. Practical points people miss: route the cable with a drip loop at the terminal end so water runs off rather than into the connector, keep the router indoors and near where you actually use Wi-Fi rather than next to the dish, and reset the obstruction statistics after the move or the new map will be blended with the old one and appear to show no improvement. Moving to a different address is a different matter — a fixed residential plan is tied to a service address, and relocating the kit permanently means updating that address in your account, which may put you into a different cell with different availability. Roam-type plans exist precisely to avoid that constraint.

Does fixing obstructions change my Starlink price or plan?

No — obstruction is a property of your site, not a service tier, so clearing it leaves the monthly bill untouched and there is no credit or discount for having a poor sky view. What is worth knowing is the escape route if the site turns out to be unfit: Starlink sells hardware with a returns window, so if you buy a kit, mount it properly and cannot get obstruction below the app’s warning threshold, check the current returns terms on your country’s shop page promptly rather than spending months on masts first. The fixes themselves are separate one-off costs — cable, pole, concrete, labour — and should be budgeted against the hardware line, never against the subscription.

Is Starlink available at my address if my site is obstructed?

Availability and obstruction are independent tests and passing one says nothing about the other. The map can return several states: available, waitlisted, sold out, or open only to certain tiers while residential capacity in that cell is constrained. A waitlisted cell can open without warning as capacity is added, so it is worth re-checking periodically rather than treating one reading as final, and a mobile or Roam plan is sometimes usable at an address where the fixed residential product is closed. Check availability before you cost a mast — and if the map says available while the app says 8% obstruction, the limiting factor is your treeline rather than the network.