3 ms·
> ground terminals required to connect to them are expensive and power-hungry I mean... Starlink terminals cost a few hundred dollars and require about 100W, w
by hughes 2y ago
> ground terminals required to connect to them are expensive and power-hungry
I mean... Starlink terminals cost a few hundred dollars and require about 100W, which includes the wifi router. How much lower can you really go?
> Greenerwave’s terminal will use just 70 watts
I guess about that low. Hope they bundle it with an efficient router.
- buescher 2y agoThat's -1.5 dB. Or about half the voltage at the antenna. RF engineers will do a lot for a solid dB.
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoI think you're talking about different numbers, that's not the antenna voltage or RF output power, just the system input power (think VCC on all the phase shifters, FPGAs, PAs, etc). Unclear what the gain on the new antenna is.
- buescher 2y agoGood catch. You're right about the antenna voltage if it's system power. But it's not all that clear in the article either! Here's an example: >Most steerable antennas typically use somewhere between 500 watts and 1 kilowatt of power, but thanks to the metasurface antenna’s passive beamforming approach, Greenerwave’s terminal will use just 70 W, Lerosey says. I'd presume that the Starlink 100W terminal is not a directly competing technology. Rereading the whole article carefully it seems that the power savings comes from not actively switching so I think you're right that it's system power.
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoIt kinda just reads like marketing fluff, they have a 30% reduction but they want a big valuation so they decided to find some irrelevant system to compare to so they could say it was a 90% reduction. A terminal in that size class would literally start melting if it was pushing 1kw.