The Starlink app gives you a circular map covered in colors and a percentage — and then leaves you to figure out what any of it means. This guide walks through every element of the obstruction map, what each one tells you, and — more importantly — what you should actually do about it.
The questions people ask the moment they open the Starlink app, stare at the circular map, and realize they have no idea what they’re looking at. Answered without jargon.
The map is a real-time record of every direction your dish tried to communicate with a satellite, and whether that communication was blocked by something physical. It uses a fisheye projection — the kind that squeezes the entire hemisphere of sky above you into a circle. The center of the circle is directly overhead. The edge of the circle is the horizon. Everything in between is the arc of sky your dish uses. When a satellite passes through a portion of that arc and the signal was blocked, the map marks that slice in red. When the signal passed cleanly, the area stays white or shows blue tracking lines. Think of it as a sky fingerprint of everything that blocked your dish over the past 12 hours — not a prediction, not a theoretical calculation, but an actual record of what happened to real satellite signals as they moved through your specific sky.
The distinction matters practically. Solid, sharp-edged red areas indicate hard obstructions — solid objects that completely blocked the satellite signal when it passed through that part of the sky. Buildings, chimneys, solid rooflines, walls, and thick poles produce this signature. The signal hits them and stops; the dish gets nothing, and the map records a clean, hard-edged red zone. Softer red-orange or diffuse patches indicate soft obstructions — trees, branches, and foliage that attenuate and scatter the signal rather than completely blocking it. Soft obstructions can actually cause more frustrating user experiences than hard ones, because the dish detects a degraded signal rather than no signal, attempts a handoff to that satellite, fails partway through, and creates a stuttering reconnection rather than a clean gap. Hard obstructions produce cleaner outages; soft ones produce erratic, unpredictable connection degradation.
Nothing is wrong — this is one of the most commonly misunderstood elements of the obstruction map. The white or unfilled band crossing your map is the geostationary exclusion zone, also called the Clarke Belt. Geostationary satellites — the kind used by older satellite TV services — orbit at about 35,000 km altitude and stay fixed above the equator. To prevent radio interference with those satellites, Starlink’s dishes are programmed to never transmit in the direction of the equatorial arc where those satellites sit. The band appears on the map because no Starlink satellite passes are recorded in that direction — not because it’s blocked by something physical. Per Starlink’s official support documentation, this zone has no effect on your service whatsoever. For most U.S. users, the exclusion zone falls in a direction where satellite traffic is lighter anyway, making its practical impact essentially zero.
The map is oriented to magnetic north by default for fixed installations — north at the top, south at the bottom, east to the right, west to the left — because Starlink’s fixed residential dishes use an earth-referenced coordinate frame that aligns with geographic directions. This matters practically because most Starlink satellites in the U.S. travel through the northern arc of the sky. Their orbital shells are inclined at about 53 degrees, concentrating the densest satellite traffic in the northern portion of the visible sky for users in the contiguous United States. This is why obstructions on the north side of your dish (the top of the map) matter more than equal-sized obstructions on the south side (the bottom of the map). Mobile and Roam dishes that move between locations may use a dish-oriented coordinate frame instead, which means the map orientation shifts based on where the dish is pointing rather than geographic north.
A few things. First, the map builds from actual satellite passes — if the dish hasn’t been running long enough (typically under a week for full accuracy), some satellite paths haven’t crossed your sky yet and some blockages haven’t been detected. Second, wind-moved branches create intermittent obstruction that’s hard to capture on the map because the branch isn’t always in the same position. Third, some drops aren’t obstruction-related at all — satellite handoff micro-drops happen every 15 seconds for all Starlink users regardless of sky view, firmware updates restart the dish overnight, and network congestion during peak hours can cause slowdowns that feel like drops. A clean-looking map with persistent drops points toward one of these non-obstruction causes — check the Statistics section in the app for the specific outage labels, which will indicate whether the app is logging the events as “Obstructed” or something else.
More reliable than most people assume — but with one major caveat that invalidates the results when ignored. The Starlink app’s pre-install obstruction check uses your phone’s camera and augmented reality to simulate what a dish would see from wherever your phone is positioned. The results are meaningful only if you hold the phone at the exact height and position where the dish will actually be mounted. Checking from standing height on the ground for a roof installation produces nearly useless results — your roof sits 15–20 feet higher and has a completely different perspective on surrounding trees and structures. For a roof peak install, you need to get on the roof or use a broom handle to hold the phone at roof height. The check itself is accurate; the height error is what makes it fail. Get the height right and the pre-install check is one of the most useful tools Starlink provides.
During the first few hours of operation, you’ll see blue streaks or shaded arcs across the map — these are the satellite tracking paths the dish has already measured. Blue indicates sky directions where satellites have passed and the dish successfully connected to them: clean, clear paths. The blue fills in progressively as satellites cross each part of the sky. Areas that haven’t had a satellite pass yet remain blank. Red appears if a pass was blocked. After about six hours, enough satellite passes have accumulated that the map gives a reasonable picture of your obstruction situation. According to Starlink’s support documentation, full accuracy develops over approximately one week — because satellites in different orbital planes need time to cover every possible sky direction, including those at low elevation angles that only appear a few times per day.
The shape of the map is not arbitrary. Every position on the circle corresponds to a real direction in your sky. Once you understand the geometry, you can look at a red zone on the map and immediately know which direction from your dish to look for the problem.
The map uses a fisheye-style polar projection — imagine a fisheye camera lens pointing straight up from the dish. Everything directly overhead sits at the center of the circle. Everything at the horizon — the lowest elevation angle where satellites can be reached — sits at the outermost edge of the circle. Moving from center to edge corresponds to moving from directly overhead (90° elevation) down toward the horizon (0° elevation). Starlink uses the sky from about 25° above the horizon upward, meaning the outermost ring of the map covers the zone from the horizon up to about 25° — and this outer ring is where most obstruction problems show up, because objects like trees and buildings tend to be tall but not overhead. A red zone near the center of the map is an overhead obstruction — rare, but serious. A red zone at the outer edge is a low-angle obstruction at or near the horizon, which typically catches the most satellite passes per hour because satellites entering the sky from any direction cross the outer ring first.
For fixed residential installations, the map is oriented to geographic north at the top — north at 12 o’clock, east at 3 o’clock, south at 6 o’clock, west at 9 o’clock. This orientation may shift slightly based on the dish’s detected heading but generally aligns with compass directions. Knowing this orientation is how you translate a red zone on the map to a physical direction outside. A red blob at the 11 o’clock position means a obstruction to the north-northwest. A red arc at 3 o’clock means something to the east. To identify what’s blocking your signal: find the red zone on the map, note its clock position, and look in that compass direction from where your dish is mounted. Look upward at the elevation angle corresponding to the zone’s distance from the map edge (outer = lower in the sky; inner = higher). The physical obstruction causing the red zone is almost always visually identifiable once you know exactly where to look.
Starlink’s satellites orbit in shells inclined at approximately 53 degrees. This orbital geometry concentrates the densest satellite traffic through the northern portion of the visible sky for users in the contiguous United States — roughly those between 25°N and 49°N latitude. Your dish naturally spends more time communicating with satellites crossing the northern arc (the top of the map) than any other direction. This is why a red zone at 12 o’clock on your map produces more drops per hour than the same-sized red zone at 6 o’clock. Two installations with identical obstruction percentages can have completely different user experiences if one’s blockage is in the north and the other’s is in the south. When deciding which obstruction to fix first, always prioritize anything near the 10–2 o’clock arc on the map, because clearing it produces the biggest improvement in connection reliability.
The map uses a handful of distinct visual elements and each one means something specific. The app doesn’t label any of them — which is why this section exists.
Clear sky — no obstruction detected. White areas represent portions of the sky where satellite passes occurred and the signal traveled cleanly to the dish. This is what you want covering as much of the map as possible. A mostly white map with a small red zone means the dish is working well in most directions with one specific problem area.
Active satellite tracking paths — no obstruction. Blue lines or arcs indicate the trajectories of satellites the dish has successfully tracked. Common on newer installations where the map is still filling in. Blue means the dish made contact with a satellite in that sky direction. Over the first 24–48 hours, blue progressively covers the map as more satellite passes occur, eventually resolving into either white (clear) or red (blocked).
Soft obstruction — trees, branches, foliage, power lines. These partial obstructions attenuate and scatter the signal rather than blocking it entirely. The edges are blurry because signal attenuation is gradual — as a satellite approaches the tree, signal degrades; as it passes through the densest part, signal drops further; as it emerges, signal recovers. Soft obstructions can actually cause more erratic user experience than hard ones because the dish attempts connections with attenuated signals, partially fails, and retries — creating stuttering rather than clean brief outages. Wind-moved branches produce shifting soft patches that may look different each time you check the map.
Hard obstruction — buildings, rooflines, chimneys, solid structures, rock faces. When a satellite passed through this sky direction, the signal was completely blocked. The edge of the red zone is sharp because solid objects create a clean signal cutoff: present one moment, gone the next. A solid red arc that spans a significant portion of one direction (say, 40° of arc near the map edge) typically corresponds to a building, roofline, or terrain feature blocking that slice of sky. These require physical changes — raising the dish above the blockage or repositioning it — because beam switching cannot route through a hard block.
Geostationary exclusion zone (Clarke Belt) — not an obstruction. This unfilled band appears in some locations — particularly those closer to the equator — and represents the arc of sky where Starlink deliberately avoids transmitting to prevent interference with geostationary satellites orbiting at 35,000 km altitude above the equator. Per Starlink’s official documentation, this zone has no effect on your service. Most U.S. users don’t see this band prominently because U.S. latitudes are far enough north that the equatorial direction falls below or at the edge of the dish’s usable sky arc.
The shape of a red zone is just as informative as its color. A narrow vertical slice looks completely different from a broad arc, and each pattern points to a specific type of obstruction. Find your pattern and go straight to the right fix.
| Map Pattern | What It Looks Like | Most Likely Cause | Fix Priority | Recommended Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solid red arc · wide · one direction | Clean curved band spanning 20–60° near map edge | Building or neighboring roofline | High — large blockage | Raise dish above structure height |
| Narrow solid red spike · pointing toward center | Thin wedge from edge toward middle | Utility pole, chimney, thin mast | Medium — narrow but catches passes | Reposition dish to move pole out of arc |
| Soft orange / diffuse patch · irregular edges | Blurry, cloud-like blotch in one area | Tree canopy, dense foliage | Medium — worse in summer with leaves | Targeted arborist trim of red-zone branches |
| Shifting pattern · different each day | Soft red that changes position or density | Wind-moved branches | Medium — intermittent but real | Trim branches that sway into signal path |
| Large red arc covering most of one half | Red covers 90–180° of one side | Terrain ridge, hill, or mountain slope | High — terrain is fixed | Find higher property point or consider tower |
| Red band running around the full outer edge | Ring of red at horizon level all around | Dish too low — surrounded by structures or trees | Critical — relocate or raise significantly | Raise dish above surrounding obstacles |
| Small red dot near center of map | Tiny red mark toward middle of circle | Overhead obstruction (rare) — chimney directly above | Moderate — few passes directly overhead | Reposition dish away from overhead object |
| Clear band crossing the map | Unfilled strip passing through circle | Geostationary exclusion zone (Clarke Belt) | None — not a problem at all | No action needed — fully normal |
| Red arc at 12 o’clock (top of map) | Blockage in north direction | Tree, building, or terrain to the north | Highest priority in U.S. — most satellite traffic | Address immediately — north blockage hurts most |
| Mostly white with speckled red dots | Clean map with scattered tiny red points | Sparse branches or thin obstacles at edges | Low — minor attenuation only | Trim if score is above 3% · leave if under 2% |
More people contact Starlink support about the white band than almost any other map element. The concern is understandable — it looks like a large swath of sky is missing. It isn’t. Here’s the full explanation.
The white or unfilled band crossing your obstruction map is a self-imposed no-transmit zone, not a physical obstruction. Geostationary satellites — used by older satellite TV services like DirecTV and satellite internet services like HughesNet — orbit at approximately 35,786 km altitude and remain fixed above the equator. Starlink’s LEO satellites orbit at only 550 km and move constantly, creating a situation where a Starlink satellite could occasionally pass between a ground dish and a geostationary satellite, potentially causing radio frequency interference. To prevent this, Starlink programs every dish to calculate its own geographic position and avoid transmitting in any direction that aligns with the geostationary arc. The band appears as unfilled on the map because no satellite passes are recorded there — not because something is blocking that sky. Per Starlink’s own support documentation, this zone has zero effect on service performance.
Nothing. This is the only element on the obstruction map that requires zero response. The white band is permanent, intentional, and consistent with every Starlink dish in the world. It will not change, cannot be removed, and has no effect on your download speeds, latency, or connection reliability. If you’re in the U.S., the band typically falls in a direction where relatively few satellites pass anyway, making its presence even less relevant to practical performance. If someone tells you the white band is causing your connection problems, they are wrong — every Starlink dish has this band regardless of performance.
The map gets more accurate over time because it learns from actual satellite passes. A 30-minute-old map is a rough sketch. A week-old map is a reliable diagnostic tool. Knowing where you are in that progression changes how much weight to give the results.
In the first hour of operation, the map shows blue tracking arcs for the satellite paths that have already crossed the dish’s view. These blue arcs show where satellites went but don’t yet show a complete picture of which directions are clear or blocked. Few satellite paths have occurred at each sky position, so the pattern is sparse. Red zones may appear if a hard obstruction has already blocked a few passes, but soft obstructions like trees may not yet show up consistently. Do not make relocation or installation decisions based on the first hour of data. The map is actively building. What you see is a starting sketch, not a finished picture. If you see obvious solid red in a specific direction within the first hour, that’s a genuine hard obstruction — but wait longer before concluding areas with no red are fully clear.
After approximately six hours of operation, enough satellite passes have occurred that the map gives a reasonable initial picture of the obstruction situation. Most sky directions will have had at least one satellite pass, so major hard obstructions should be visible and primary soft obstructions should show up as orange-red patches. Starlink’s own documentation confirms that the map is substantially filled after six hours. This is a good point to do a first review of your obstruction situation — identifying the locations and rough severity of the red zones. The six-hour map is good enough to identify the big problems but may miss subtle soft obstructions or undercount areas where only a few satellite paths have occurred. If the six-hour map looks clean and your connection seems fine, that’s a positive early signal — but continue monitoring through the first week.
Starlink’s official documentation states the map reaches its full accuracy over approximately one week. By this point, satellites in all orbital planes have passed through every sky direction at every elevation angle, giving the map a complete record of which paths are clear and which are blocked. After the first week, the map updates continuously and automatically — it detects new obstructions as they appear (such as leaves growing in spring or a new structure being built nearby) and updates the relevant sky zones accordingly. The one-week map is the map to use for any serious obstruction analysis, repositioning decisions, or comparisons before and after a fix. If you trimmed branches or repositioned the dish, wait a full week for the map to update before evaluating whether the fix worked. Checking too soon gives an incomplete picture of the improvement.
The most valuable use of the obstruction tool is before the dish goes up — and the most common mistake is doing it wrong and then being surprised when the installed dish underperforms.
The Starlink app is free to download and the obstruction checker works without purchasing any hardware. Open the app, navigate to the obstruction check tool (labeled “Check for Obstructions”), and point your phone’s camera skyward from the location where you’re considering mounting the dish. The app uses augmented reality to overlay a sky grid on the camera view and analyze the field of view for potential obstructions. It produces a percentage score and a directional assessment (north, south, east, west obstruction presence). The tool is genuinely useful — it has helped thousands of users identify installation problems before committing to a mount location. The critical instruction everyone needs to read before using it: the phone must be at the planned dish height, not at standing height from the ground.
The pre-install check shows what a dish would see from wherever your phone is positioned. If your phone is at standing height and your dish will be on the roof peak 20 feet higher, the scan results are meaningless — you’re checking the sky view from a completely different position. At standing height, your house blocks part of the sky that the roof-mounted dish would have clear access to, and trees that appear above your roofline may not be in the dish’s actual field of view from the roof. Conversely, trees on the far side of the yard that don’t look problematic from ground level may become obstructions from the roof’s different perspective. Get the phone to the actual mount height. For a roof peak install, use a ladder to reach the roof or tape the phone to a pole or broomstick extended to roof height and scan from there. This single step transforms the check from a rough guess into an accurate prediction of installed performance.
A single scan at one spot is rarely enough. The sky view varies significantly across a property — the front roof vs. the back roof, an outbuilding vs. the main house, the northwest corner vs. the northeast corner. Walk the entire property at the planned dish height, running the check at each candidate location. Most properties have one spot that scores substantially better than others, and finding it before drilling a single hole can save significant time and expense. Starlink sells a 150-foot proprietary cable precisely for situations where the best obstruction score is away from the house — a clearing, an outbuilding, or the far corner of the property. If the scan results in an unexpected location score dramatically better, the cable run may be the right solution rather than compromising with a worse mounting position near the house.
If you’re evaluating a property with deciduous trees (oaks, maples, birches, elms — the kind that lose leaves in fall), the scan results from October through March show the best-case scenario, not the reality. When leaves emerge in spring, the same trees that read 3% obstruction in February can climb to 15–20% by July. If you can only check in winter, add 10–15 percentage points to whatever score you see to estimate summer performance. If you can wait for a full-leaf check in midsummer, the July scan gives the true year-round worst case — and anything under 5% in July will be reliable all year. Evergreen trees (pines, firs, spruces) don’t change between seasons, so their scan result is accurate any time of year.
Reading the map is only valuable if it leads to action. Here’s the three-step process for translating what you see on the map into a fix that actually improves your connection.
Open the map and mentally note the clock position of every red area — 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock, and so on. Write them down if it helps. A red zone at 11 o’clock is to the north-northwest. A red zone at 4 o’clock is to the east-southeast. After noting the positions, go outside to where your dish is mounted and look in each noted direction. Look upward — the elevation angle is determined by how close the red zone is to the edge of the map (outer edge = near the horizon; inner = higher up). In most cases you can visually identify the specific branch, roofline, chimney, or tree crown responsible for each red zone within two to three minutes of looking. That visual identification is what makes the next step — deciding on the right fix — precise and targeted rather than a guess.
If you have multiple red zones, fixing the right one first makes the biggest difference. Priority order: first, fix any red zone in the 10–2 o’clock arc (the northern sky), because this direction carries the most satellite traffic for U.S. users and any blockage here produces more drops per hour than blockages elsewhere. Second, fix the largest continuous red arcs before the small scattered ones — a 40° solid red arc is causing far more drops than ten scattered small dots. Third, fix hard obstructions (solid red with sharp edges) before soft ones (diffuse orange-red patches) if they’re similar in size — hard obstructions cause complete signal loss during each satellite pass, whereas soft ones cause variable degradation. Clearing the single worst red zone often resolves 70–80% of the obstruction-related drops, because one obstruction typically dominates the others in terms of satellite pass impact.
After making any physical change — trimming branches, raising the dish, repositioning the mount — wait at least five to seven days before comparing the map to see whether the fix worked. The map needs time to accumulate satellite pass data showing that the previously blocked sky direction is now clear. Checking the next day gives an incomplete picture, because the cleared direction hasn’t had enough satellite passes yet to show confidently as white on the updated map. Also check the obstruction percentage in the Statistics section before and after — a successful branch trim or dish repositioning should produce a measurable drop in the percentage, typically from whatever the pre-fix value was down to somewhere closer to the 0–5% range. If the map still shows red in the same location after a week, the fix didn’t fully clear the obstruction and additional changes are needed — more branches, more height, or a different position entirely.
No — this is exactly what a new installation in a good location looks like in the first few hours. Blue means satellite tracking paths are being recorded, and no blockages have been detected yet. Continue letting the dish run and check back after six hours for a more complete picture, and again after a week for full accuracy. If the map is still mostly blue with very little red after a full week, your dish is in an excellent location with minimal obstruction — that’s a genuinely good result, not a malfunction. If you have persistent drops despite a clean blue-and-white map after a week, the problem isn’t obstruction at all — check the Statistics section for the actual outage log labels, which will point to the real cause.
A red zone at the top of the map (north direction) combined with regular drops is the most common Starlink obstruction situation, and it’s almost always solvable. Go outside and look northward from your dish at the elevation angle corresponding to where the red zone sits on the map — if it’s near the map edge, look toward the horizon; if it’s a bit inward, look higher up. You’re looking for the specific object that appears when you look in that direction: a tree crown, a roofline edge, a chimney. Once you’ve identified it, the fix is straightforward. For a tree: targeted branch removal of the specific upper branches crossing that sky zone. For a roofline: the dish needs to be higher than the blocking structure. For a chimney: the dish needs to be repositioned so the chimney falls outside the signal cone. North obstruction is always the first priority because it blocks the most satellite traffic.
This is seasonal foliage in action, and it’s one of the most common situations Starlink users encounter. Deciduous trees that were bare in winter have leafed out, and their foliage has moved into satellite paths that were clear before. This is expected behavior — the obstruction map auto-updates as it detects new blockages, and it can detect leafing trees as their leaves grow into the signal path. The red zones that appeared on the March-to-June timeline correspond exactly to the trees that came into leaf during that period. Open the map, identify which directions have new red, and look in those directions from the dish to confirm which specific trees are responsible. The fix for seasonal foliage is targeted branch removal of the identified upper branches — addressing the specific crowns causing the new red zones rather than a general trim of everything nearby.
Almost certainly a height problem with the pre-install check. If the check was done from standing height but the dish ended up on a wall or low roof section significantly higher than where you were standing, the scan was measuring a different sky perspective than what the dish actually has. Alternatively, if the check was done in winter during bare-tree season and the installation occurred in summer with full leaf cover, the foliage change accounts for the gap. A third possibility: the check was done in one location but the dish was installed in a slightly different position with more nearby obstruction. The good news: a 12% obstruction score is often fixable. Open the map, identify the specific red zones and directions, and address them — tree trimming or a mount adjustment often brings a 12% score down to under 3%, fully recovering the performance you expected.
A clean obstruction map means obstruction isn’t your problem — but that still leaves several other causes worth checking. First, look at the outage log in Statistics (App → Statistics → Outages) and note what each drop is labeled as. Unlabeled brief gaps every 15 seconds are satellite handoff micro-outages, normal for all Starlink users and not obstruction-related. A drop at the same time every night is almost always a firmware update. Drops between 7–11 PM without obstruction labels are network congestion during peak hours. Second, check whether the drops only affect Wi-Fi devices or affect a device connected by Ethernet cable as well — if Ethernet is stable and Wi-Fi drops, the problem is your home network, not Starlink. A clean obstruction map plus persistent drops means the issue is somewhere in the cable, the router, the firmware, or the network — none of which the obstruction map can show.
This guide provides educational information about the Starlink obstruction map and its elements. Map appearance, accuracy, and color conventions may vary by app version, dish generation, and firmware update. Information about the geostationary exclusion zone is sourced from Starlink’s official support documentation. Pre-install scan accuracy depends on user technique — always follow Starlink’s official installation guide instructions. This content is entirely original and independently written.