It isn’t necessarily implied, but if this thing is pulling a nominal 30W-40W (assuming considering the 60W PSU) then I don’t know how much use this would be for a portable device, even for RVs. That’s a pretty significant load, even for an amplified antenna, I would have thought?

Did some quick research on a major American car parts retailer's website. The biggest batteries they sell are rated as high as 188Ah (though they use a weird industry-specific unit to say that). Many are closer to 25-50Ah. Definitely enough juice to power a terminal for several hours.

This lines up with my personal experiences. I have personally used a car battery to keep a big gaming laptop charged for an entire weekend, and it was being used (if not under heavy load) for about 10 hours a day.

Those big batteries are extremely heavy and very expensive, but we're talking about people who want broadband internet service on their boat. Money is not a concern here.

I'm sure Starlink has different power modes for these things, but the average consumer is likely far more interested in optimizing for connection speed and latency.

Pretty much all of us in the vanlife/overland space run Lithium batteries now, the smallest of which is basically 100Ah. I'm just about to put either 300Ah or 400Ah into my new Jeep camper to run an induction cook top, water pump, hot water, lights, charging and a lot more.

I also just mounted 600W of solar on the roof.

The power needs of Starlink is a tad annoying, but certainly not a deal breaker for anyone living in a vehicle that actually needs internet anywhere on the planet.

Yep, on my boat, I converted the original square dish to run off my 12v lithium batteries.

I have plenty of solar and batteries to run starlink 24/7.

Even if you don’t have a lot of amp hours, starlink allows you to set a sleep schedule where it would use way less power.

But ditching the starlink router and converting to run off 12v isn’t that hard

Interesting. How does the cost of the lithium conversion compare to the Starlink terminal?

With sat, the power needs are mostly a physics problem. You can't generate a 30 watt signal unless you draw 30 watts from somewhere. It's just the nature of the beast. It's also why lower-power sat systems like Iridium or Apple's thing have relatively limited functionality.

You likely wouldnt be running this off a lead acid car battery.

You’d have a lithium battery and an additional power source, like solar or generator, to top that battery off.

I was operating under the assumption that the system would be wired into the boat/car's existing electrical system, which in most cases will use one or more lead-acid batteries.

Edit: a vanlifer showed up and informed me that Lithium conversions are a thing. Turns out you can have your Lithium and eat it too. Cool stuff.

Normal car batteries really hate if you discharge them anywhere close to their capacity. You can get deep-cylce lead acid batteries built for that, but at that point just get lithium iron phosphate batteries.

That's the whole thing, though - shove a large enough lead-acid battery into the boat/car's electrical system, and you won't need to discharge the battery very far at all. 60W on a 100Ah 12V battery is nearly a full day's worth of battery life.

Now consider that the real power draw is probably well below the supply's rating, so it's actually 40ish watts on a 1200Wh battery. Now we're pushing 30 hours.

Now consider the real sickos of the "rich boat owner" class. These people have large engines in their boats, and those engines have alternators. All cars have those, too. That's a power source already integrated into the boat itself. A simple DC step-up regulator wired into the boat's existing electrical system is a much more elegant solution than a second set of batteries and a second power source to charge those batteries.

Needing to add an extra battery to an off grid power supply just to power a “portable” router designed to accept grid power and not 12V is a huge fail on starlinks part, regardless of the cost of the battery to power it.

For reference 60w is similiar power draw to a Dometic fridge or a laptop.

Also adding a huge heavy battery to a boat is a non-negligible consideration in a lot of cases.

I designed the 12V electrical for my F-150 camper (and some friends’) and I could easily do 2 straight days of 40W with no recharge.

My fridge pulls 50W when cycling the compressor and my current 5G modem/router pulls 15W. Indoor lights draw over 20W alone on full tilt.

I have 200W of solar on my truck and my alternator does 400W and realistically I charge at around 550W on a good day so 40W is a drop in the bucket.

RVs can have much beefier systems than my setup. I don’t full time or anything — just long time camper for 10 years before van life was a thing, so my setup is relatively low capacity.

I mean, I doubt it was your intent to cast this unfavorably, and I certainly don't want to suggest you don't know what's best for you, but I read this as a receiver/router that pulls more power than all of your internal lighting, nearly as much (maybe more at peak) than your refrigerator, double that of a similar 5G device, and all of that strikes me as a really poor implementation. But I work a lot in embedded devices, so maybe I'm just overly sensitive...60W seems absurd for a set of radios and an SoC.

I wonder if that's what the adapter supplies, and the device can actually do 12-30V or whatnot.

Not many devices that run off 30V will run off 12V too. It's too big of a difference.

But 12V to 36V boost converters are readily available and very cheap.

I imagine most of those devices have a buck converter inside, no?

If you're drawing 30V 2A (60W) through a connector rated for 2.5A, and you try to draw the same 60W at 12V i.e. 5A you're in trouble because the connector's not designed for 5A.

And not every DC-DC converter is sized for a wide range of input voltages. A DC-DC converter with a "2:1 input voltage range" might accept anything from 18 to 36 volts, whereas a converter with a "4:1 input voltage range" might accept 9 to 36 volts. The wider input voltage range generally costs a bit more too.

No sure about vans, but aren't lots of cars moving to 48V?

Some manufacturer RVs and DIY builds are 48VDC now with stepdown converters for the legacy stuff that expects 12V. The problem with that is that practically every RV gadget on the market assumes 12V. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

Yeah because higher voltage reduces the cost of wiring, and 48V is still under the 50V legal limit for "low voltage".

Not sure what your point is though.

if the are power electronics chip they use is rated to handle 12 VDC to 48 VDC, which 30 VDC happens to be in-between, then they could just use that chip and you could give it 12V or 48V, whichever you had handy. If all cars are moving to 48V, that makes that more likely.

That's a very wide range and to build a gadget to take that range would cost more, and thus it's not done.

Most "12 V" gadgets only accept the rough range of what a 12 V battery might give them, which is usually only up to 15.4 V while charging.

USB-C 3.1 PD does 240 watts by raising the voltage to 48V, so the chips to accept that already exist, even if they're expensive right now.

It's DC with support for USB