[thatoneguy]

It doesn't take a lot of juice to send signals straight up. Iridium has been using transceivers to do similar IoT things for decades and my old Inmarsat satphone used a fraction of a watt to get my voice up to geosynchronous orbit just so someone standing next to me on an outdoor landing could hear a message from space.

[rtkwe]

The Inmasrsats are also way bigger satellites with correspondingly large antennas and ability to sniff out the weak signals from handsets. Starlink base stations use a lot more power and idle around 15w and go up to 20-50+ while transmitting from what I can find depending on the model. A good portion of that likely comes from things like the heater (is it smart and only powers on when it's cold?) and wifi router too but it's still a lot more than older satellite phone setups.

https://www.ecoflow.com/au/blog/how-much-power-does-starlink...