Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons...

Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old grandpas bragging about how they made a contact with someone across the ocean with 5W on their homebuilt HF radio. Starlink may have also made a conscious decision to make the user terminals "overpowered" so they can use a less sensitive receiver on the satellite, saving SpaceX weight, power usage, construction costs, and launch costs. The cost of more power usage is paid for by the user with an extra penny per month in their electric bill.

More like $10/month, not a penny.

That's assuming that you could get the power consumption down to zero, which is impossible. While a penny was an exaggeration, a 5W power savings over a month is about 50 cents savings on someone's power bill.

Yep, for me it would be $8.50.

For reference, this is an order of magnitude greater than the typical power consumption for existing satellite dishes / 4G modems, which typically operate at around 10W of power consumption.

For reference, most existing satellite dishes are receive only, and 4G modems only have to close link on a tower a few miles away, and at RFs where atmospheric attenuation is much lower.

Huh? You think existing satellite internet is receive only? How exactly would the web work in such a system?

> Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite.

Is it transmitting anything to the satellite when you are not actually trying to send internet data?

It's definitely doing... something. I had my Kill-A-Watt in it for a few hours with some usage and lots of idle periods, and between the dish and router, power consumption was never below 94W. Average around 104W, peaks at 124W.

Motors weren't being used during my measurement period either.

The dish gets pretty warm in operation (it was already a warm spring day, so it wasn't trying to de-ice or anything).

My guess is that it's always communicating with the Satellites to adjust its position.

For anyone interested in a teardown, Shahriar at The Signal Path is a pro and he did one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6MfM8EFkGg

Highly recommended. Goes deep into the antenna design and overall components (and why it costs so much to manufacture).

Are you in the UK? (Wondering where pennys are still in common usage.)

Here in Australia, for 100W / hour I'm going to be paying ~ A$250 / year to keep it powered. That's about 160 euro, or 200 usd.

And it has 2 motors for dynamic aiming

There’s a pretty crazy amount of electronics in the dish. They are likely selling it at well below cost at present.

Teardown showing PCB at: https://youtu.be/iOmdQnIlnRo?t=2152

And more detailed RF analysis at https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg

The CEO just mentioned first version of the dish cost $3000 to manufacture, and it's currently down to $1500. Major goal is to reduce manufacturing cost, since they're selling the thing for $500 and taking a loss right now.

the closest thing I have ever previously seen to a starlink phased array is the flat panel phased array radar in the nose radome of an air superiority interceptor type aircraft.

It's not just an antenna.

It's actually a whole satellite terminal as well as all the electronics for controlling the phased array. It can operate entirely without the router they give you - plug in a computer, or another router (into the white port on the POE injector), and off you go.

e:

If you're interested in watching a Teardown of Dishy, you can see one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo

100W is actually really low in the class of two way satellite equipment that's capable of 100 x 15 Mbps speeds or greater.

I am not talking about ordinary cheap consumer grade hughesnet or viasat stuff, but if you were to do the power budget for an idirect x3 modem and a traditional geostationary ku-band VSAT setup with a 20W BUC, the actual AC wall power consumed would be quite a lot more. Just the BUC is going to be 200W.

Hughes and viasat idle at about 30W and peak at 70W. Both are capable of 100/15 speeds.

but in real world use, often much, much less. The average screenshot of speed tests I see from unhappy viasat and hughesnet customer is like 2 to 5 Mbps down and 0.9 Mbps up. Maybe at 0300 in the morning.

What I was referring to is the class of VSAT equipment much more costly than a proprietary viasat or hughesnet terminal, which the ordinary consumer will never see, that's capable of doing a dedicated 100/15.

Fair enough, and you seem reasonable based on all your comments. Why is anyone giving any credence to the starlink speed tests? They are maybe 5% of the target user base they'll need to be profitable with this number of satellites, yet again and again, nobody mentions that. The funny thing is that everyone dismisses the common outages as a beta issue, but the speed and latency are never considered a beta feature.

Just for comparison satellite dish (Satellite television dish) uses approximately 30 watts

https://joteo.net/en-us/electricity-usage-calculator/electri...

A satellite dish does not transmit any information to the satellite. Satellite TV is a pure broadcast system in the forward direction.

Moreover, comparing a parabolic receiver with a phased array is quite unfair. The amount and complexity of the electronics and processing power required is several orders of magnitude different.

A better comparison might be HughesNet. Not perfect since it's different classes of satellites, but their modem is spec'd at drawing up to 60 watts on their latest gen. Though, in practice, it tends to draw around 15-25 watts, at least according to comments I can find online.

One of the benefits of this (maybe justified retroactively, but very real) is that it melts snow off the dish.

Seems to me that most "normal" satellite gear like satellite tv is receiver-only.