Hello, I have Starlink working in our Cirrus so my wife can do her medical chart work when we fly. She has to do it through a VPN and it’s requiring her to keep reinitiating the link (maybe because the latency or something when the satellites switch). Does anyone have experience with a work around? She is having to go through a 2 step verification process every 10 minutes or so, it works great in between these breaks in service. She would be eternally grateful if someone knew of a work around.
Thanks
John Freeman
Memphis TN
I’m virtually always connected to an in-office VPN and have no issues. Occasionally SL has latency or momentary drops (just the nature of satellite comms), but in my case the VPN doesn’t ever miss a beat. Offer this as a data point that it is possible to run over a VPN without issue.
What it really comes down to is the VPN configuration itself - either on the client or server side - and the type of VPN (OpenVPN, Wireguard, etc.). There’s typically timeout settings, ie: where it keeps retrying to re-establish the connection x number of times or for x period of time - that’s how mine gets back online if a drop occurs. There’s unfortunately no straightforward solution other than to say these settings are often configured on the server-side… which in the case like your wife’s would may be impossible to get them to change depending on if it’s her practice or a larger healthcare provider.
Another aspect to this is if there is a drop that occurs, whatever 2-step mechanism they’re using may be able to be configured to recognize drops and allow a non-2-step re-connection if the dropped connection is within say 10 seconds (or whatever) and is from the same IP address. This too is unfortunately going to be on the server-side as well.
I wish there was an easy solution but it seems to me like the VPN she’s connecting to is tuned to be very strict - almost overly so - but can see why that would be the case with medical work (and may even be a requirement, no first hand knowledge).
Perhaps other can chime in on some client-side tweaks which could help, but from my insights into setting these up and using them daily I don’t have any magic solution to share.
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Agreed. What if she used Remote Desktop to connect to a home pc that had the vpn client running? Then she used a more resilient RD connection and the von itself was running from home to server? Some VPN confits won’t allow this, not sure of your wife’s situation.
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That should theoretically work perfectly (We use Splashtop extensively and it works great)… Here’s the caveat (sadly no such thing as a free lunch): At least with Splashtop, it absolutely obliterates data buckets. While my typical data usage is 1gb/hour, when using a remote desktop connection that skyrockets to 15gb/hr. In reality this comes out to about $7.50/hr assuming you need to buy additional data buckets so it’s not even a rounding error in cost compared to what I’m sure her time is worth while working. Just wanted to make everyone aware of this caveat.
Great thinking outside the box for another way to crack this nut. I’d bet this is a viable game plan. Especially given that the two connections are theoretically non-conflicting, ie: John’s wife’s RD is one piece of software such as Splashtop and the VPN is a separate one providing that work link. As you noted there may be limitations in place where they’ve gotten creative to disallow this in the software architecture… but I’m sure there’s some RD or another that would work. I’d say the native windows RDS is probably the most likely for them to be able to “block” whereas a third party like Splashtop would be much more difficult for them to control/disallow.
Really easy to test this (while not even airborne), just fire up the dish and see if doing the connections in this fashion works. Look forward to hearing the results!
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I have yet to try This solution via Starlink, so I am not sure what the data usage would but I on my servers and a few other critical devices, I use an IP KVM system.
I recently switched to https://jetkvm.com
It’s easy to use and works great.
There is some setup involved, but the hardest part is mirroring your monitor to the KVM port if you use it on a desktop. If you can do that, you’re golden.
You do have to hardwire this device to the internet, that is another inconvenience for home users, but is a pro in my book.
Another great solution for a possible workaround which could be viable for the OP’s situation. Not sure of the resiliency over SL with drops, but worth testing.
Thanks for the insight on this new device, @ErikGun . For years we’ve used the Lantronix Spider KVM devices (Spider KVM | Device Management OOB | Lantronix) for servers where were need Bios-level remote control to be able to access things like RAID config/rebuilding.
The good part about the Lantronix is they’re super simple to set up (especially given that we don’t penetrate the firewall, only accessible internally so VPN in to access)… The bad part is I feel like I’ve time-warped back to 1995 accessing them using Java browser appellate. Devices serve there purpose, I’m just really glad we rarely need to access them because it’s a clumsy (at best) experience.
Perhaps the device you’ve recommended bridges the best of both worlds where it’s actually a usable interface (sounds like that’s the case) - worth it for the OP to give that a whirl especially with such a low price point to see if it solves their issue.
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I received the EXACT same reply from my Cirrus Service Center.
CJ
I’m late to the Starlink party, would you mind sending me a link to the Bradket also?
Thanks in advance.
You bet! I will send you a DM for your address
I have found that weather isn’t quite as good on Starlink as I had hoped. It’s certainly not bad - and I love all the weather options that you can’t get over ADS-B or even SiriusXM - but I found the regular internet radar is not ideal in flight.
On a recent trip (in a PC-12, for the record) I compared Internet to ADS-B to SiriusXM. I actually found myself going back to ADS-B a lot.
Here’s regular ForeFlight Internet radar (the new layer, if you want to call it that):
Here’s ADS-B:
I actually liked the ugly old Internet radar:
Anybody have a preference?
I don’t see a lot of difference from a practical POV between those, I could work with any of them. I don’t mind blocky Wx. The Wx is really done in packets so anything “smoothed” is just computer smoothing of the packets as I understand it.
I have been using different sites with SL internet availability. Windy is great and now available with SL. I have a couple of others bookmarked on my iPad mini (not with me) but they are NOAA or Weather Underground and a few others. One thing I’ve noticed is that Radar is maybe 5 to 7 minutes less delayed according to the time stamp. If that makes a difference for me I am closer than I want to be to cells 
I do like seeing satellite images. Flew to Monterey recently and could actually see what the marine layer was doing (ended up being a VFR arrival) but the METAR reading at one point reported some clouds at 500 feet. About 15 minutes later they had not updated the METAR and I could see the clouds had moved out. Useful.
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So for folks that fly internationally (no XM, no ADS-B coverage) but have starlink global priority, what is the best radar weather tools available ?
Here is a flight moment where I compared SL and ADS-B (Foreflight with Sentry) weather. The weather was moving northward. The blocky looking one on the bottom was ADS-B, the top is the internet supplied weather. I’m running both IPads on the same version of Foreflight, since I always carry a standby in my backpack.
Flying a RANS S-21, running lean of peak, with a BIG tailwind, traveling SE on the course line. The weather out the window looked like the internet picture, with the rain well N/NE of me. So far, the internet weather wins my spot testing. I usually don’t take photos of everything I do, but I remember thinking that this was a perfect comparison, having both running on the exact same platform.
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In a nutshell, Windy.
Windy.app or windy.com ?
Also, in the comparison photos I posted above, the internet radar is set to ‘classic’, and the ADS-B radar is with 4 color radar ‘OFF’. I find that the 4 color radar paints way more than what’s really there at our altitudes.
I’ve been using Windy and I’m still not really sold on it. Maybe I’m not looking at the right layers. I’ve even watched a bunch of instructional videos. When I use the Weather Radar or Radar+ pages there is a slider for a 1 hour forecast. My problem is that this just looks like it slides the current radar image forward, rather than being a forecast. I’ve compared it to the HRR forecast on Tropical Tidbits, which I’ve come to trust, and Windy seems lacking.
I’ve also used the Rain, Thunder page for longer term forecasts. The imagery seems to be pretty consistent with HRR, but I don’t really like the way it looks.
Finally, there isn’t a way to put in a route and keep it on the screen that I’ve found. There’s a distance measuring feature, but it is cumbersome and then the line disappears
Steve, I’m not a Foreflight user, but it looks to me that the top iPad says 12:35 pm and the slider is set to -14 minutes. Does that mean the image is from 12:21 pm? And the bottom iPad says 12:00 pm, but the slider is at -49 minutes.
It looks like the Foreflight version was more current and the storm had moved off Possum Kingdom to the northeast, making it a better time to go water skiing than the ADS-B image.
windy.com (NOT windy.app, that’s totally separate). Both the website and iPhone app are amazing (subscribe to Premium on the website to prevent the 30% Apple cut).
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I have found the lowest tilt image on SL extremely helpful in addition to selecting a ground station on radar scope. Delays are about 2 minutes. Flying home a couple of weeks ago, this was exceptionally helpful from the Wisconsin CPPP. Not that I would use this data to avoid thunderstorms, but it is certainly a way to stay dry and plan your flight.
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