I currently use the latest Celfi go in my grand Cherokee, and it works a treat whilst on the road.
just watched a video from the !lifestyle Pioneer on the Van Connect 5g from Cowfish who also now can connect the Starlink dish to their router for integration and needs only 12v.
technology is obviously moving forwards real quick, what are peoples thoughts out there
Just ditch the phone side of it altogether and go Starlink, when the new little dish becomes avilable in Oz it runs direct on 12v and is about the size of a sheet of A4 paper.
We have the 2nd gen dish and it sits on the back of the Oka running 24/7 on 12v with a 12v system that I assembled myself without the need to cut any cables for under $300.
If for some reason you need phone data at some stage just hotspot your phone.
We've camped in rainforest with dense tree cover and while the starlink was slower it still worked better than the phone speedwise.
Cel-fi go is a signal booster, if the signal is poor it can boost it. Van Connect is not a booster, it is a modem and antenna, the antenna may help in some areas, the modem is simply a modem. For the cost I personally don't think either of them have enough benefit over just hotspotting off your phone to justify buying. Neither of them can help at all if you aren't within tower range which is where Starlink excels and if I was going to spend money that is where I would put it.
We've run a Telstra Nighthawk mobile modem for years, swapping over to the latest gen as they died usually due to batteries giving up the ghost. At the beginning of the year when the 3rd gen dishy's were on the horizon and Starlink gen2 dishy's were on sale for $199 I bit the bullet and bought one. Experience so far is that it absolutely flogs the phone network for speed and availability, we've camped in full rainforest and still had a decent service with a very much obstructed view of the sky and while it was much slower than normal and had the occasional glitch/delay it was still very usable.
Ours is on a roam plan so only on when travelling and the first month away found that running it on 240v with the inverter on all the time especially in warmerr weather where it's cooling fan starting up occasionally became annoying plus the power usage was considerable.
While home I looked at the commercial 12v offerings and found them wanting and in some cases very bulky so built my own using a Yaosheng 3 in 1 unit that allows use of the standard dishy cable without any mods or cutting and a TP Link 12v modem. I put the 3 in 1 in a plastic Sistema clip top box about 130 x130 x 60 and mounted the modem on top of it, plugged into a 12v socket and it all works well, actually faster than the Starlink modem to boot plus it has "guest" level if you want fellow travels to connect as well.
As Meredith says, the Cel-Fi is only a booster, but in a low signal area it does boost the signal quite a bit making it usable and reliable. I carry a telescopic pole with the external antenna mounted about 6 metres up.
