Fight the Power!

Using Starlink on the road requires some creative power solutions

This is another in what will likely be an ongoing series about Starlink Roam. I’ve been using it for a few months now and have a pretty good feel for what it’s about. While I bought it to use in my minivan camper, I find that it’s useful enough when mobile to mount it to my Cherokee too.

What’s one more antenna?

But there’s a power problem. When I shut off the engine, the power goes out. I have a 12 Volt “radio battery” that charges through a West Mountain Radio Epic PWRgate, but it already drains itself from parasitic draw to the point where the BMS shuts down the output and the PWRgate won’t start recharging. Adding a 100W Starlink mini and an inefficient boost converter to that system will drain the battery even faster. So I’ve been running it off the Jeep’s factory 100V AC inverter. This works up to a point, but when the Cherokee is parked there’s no Starlink. And it takes a few minutes to re-acquire a connection. Because I’m using my own Mikrotik router and have the Starlink terminal in bypass mode, that wreaks havoc with any connected devices.

So a UPS is the solution. Ideally something that can run the network equipment for a few hours, is small and portable and can handle a Starlink’s power and voltage requirements. See, most everything portable is designed for 5 or 12 Volts. Starlink requires a higher voltage, ideally ~24 VDC and up to 100 Watts (2.5 Amps). The cable I use to connect Ethernet and power comes with a USB-C PD adapter that claims it is capable of of producing 100 Watts, but it seems to be very unreliable. More about that later.

A search for Starlink Mini power will return a plethora of solutions. They all seem to solve the problem the same way: by mounting to the underside of the terminal. This is great for a “wireless solution” if you’re running with the internal router, but from what I’ve seen, all of them block the Ethernet port. And I don’t think any of them are made to be mounted to roof rack. None will power anything else, like an external router. And most of them are pretty expensive too.

At first I scrounged around the house for what I had on hand. Remembering an old battery pack from around 2015 I tried it first. It had been sitting for years and so I checked to make sure the LiPO cells were still well matched and looked OK. It was rated to supply about 60 Watts at 19VDC so I knew I was pushing the limits, but it seemed to work OK for Apple Music and email, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I tried it on my morning commute after watching it near a full charge overnight. By the time I got to work it was down to about 50% power even with the charger feeding power from the Cherokee’s 110V outlet. It didn't power the Mikrotik router at all. I brought it in to the office and put it on charge in the break room. The pack didn’t reach a full charge until around 15:30, a warning of things to come.

After work I made a Costco run. Going the 14 miles from the office to Costco, the pack worked wonderfully, and Starlink stayed up the entire trip other than through Hanging Lake tunnel. When I got to Costco I noticed the pack was showing less than 50% remaining (2 of 5 LEDS). I had the charger input connected the whole time. But since I was testing I pressed on, leaving it running while I was shopping and enjoying a hot dog. When I came back it was still showing 2 LEDs so I tried disconnecting the Starlink, and the “battery gauge” bumped up to 4 LEDs. OK so probably drawing too much for the BMS to accurately report remaining capacity. The pack wasn’t warm or causing any concern so I connected it all back up and started the one hour drive home.

Somewhere around Rifle I got a warning from Apple Music “Cannot reach the server” and no more music. I pulled off at the rest stop and began investigating. The pack showed 1 flashing LED. That’s all. This time, disconnecting the terminal did nothing. OK, that’s a result. Basically a little over 2 hours of very light use. But the bigger issue was that despite having a 19V, 1.5A charger the BMS was very gentile on the cells. Probably why it lasted for 10 years, but also pretty frustrating when looking for a small charging solution.

The next power pack to try is the Bioenno Power BPP-H1500 Portable Power Generator (no longer in production). I bought this in 2020 for the “social distancing” Field Day, because group activities were outlawed and I had already rented a trailer. This solar generator was bought to run my IC-9100 and MacBook for the duration of Field Day, using some old GoalZero solar panels. It worked back then but barely. I continued to use it while car camping to run a refrigerator, induction hotplate and electric kettle. When I upgraded to EcoFlow’s system I intended to sell it on eBay but never got around to it. Since it was just sitting in the box I figured it was worth trying.

However there are some problems. First it is very large and overkill for a short stop standby power supply. It could probably run a Starlink terminal for days of light usage. Secondly, it came with a 40V, 4.0A power supply that pulled 2.5A from the wall. There’s no way the Jeep’s inverter would supply that much current, nor would the +13.8 VDC side. So I shopped around and found a small Li compatible charger that only pulled about 85 Watts. That turned out to be just enough to keep the system topped up while operating. So on a Saturday afternoon while getting a few chores done I ran a test. It managed to stay mostly full during the test and so I decided to leave it powered up over night to see how it performed over some time. On Sunday I checked the charge remaining after church, and it was about 50% remaining. This should be suitable for an overnight stay or car camping excursion, even with running the refrigerator. Unfortunately the heat got to the LCD display so I couldn’t see charge status or load info until after I bought it back inside.

But there’s a big problem with the BPP-H1500. It’s big. It takes up a lot of room. And it was relatively expensive. I’m looking for a more compact device, even if it doesn’t have as long a runtime. The $69 Daran R100 seems to fit the bill.

Daran R-100 portable power station. Photo borrowed from Amazon.com

The specs are pretty good. 89.6Wh, LiFePO4 batteries (someone did a teardown on Amazon and it uses 18650 cells). It has two USB-A and two USB-C PD ports (one 45W and the other 15W), a 12V coax output, and 100 Watt AC inverter. DC and AC outputs can be individually powered, saving a bit of capacity. It has three inputs: AC via a 2 conductor “figure 8” inlet, a coaxial “solar” input that can accept up to 30VDC/3A for a typical 100 Watt folding panel, and one of the USB-C ports can accept 15W in.

The 45 W USB-C PD port is interesting. The dual data/power cable I use with my terminal came with a USB-C adapter that claims to supply the recommended 19V/100W power. I tried using this adapter with the Ecoflow Delta Max’s PD ports but had issues, likely because the adapter is set up for USB-PD 3.1 ports with a max output of 48 Volts. The Ecoflow (and probably most power banks) max out at the USB-C 3.0 spec of 20 VDC, even though they’re capable of delivering 100 Watts. But I wanted to test it out with the R-100 anyway just to be sure. And it does work for very light Internet use. I was able to run Apple Music playlists and had a short QSO with Bob, K9MWM over Allstar while set up at Rifle Gap state park. But as soon as I tried a speed test the terminal would reset.

So the USB-C adapter won’t work. Lesson learned. Next test was to use the Starlink AC adapter and the inverter. This worked much better, keeping the power steady even under load.

Second test with the Starlink AC adapter, running the hAP2 from the 12vdc output

What’s interesting is that now that the power was stable I began seeing a lot of information about link quality in the app. Turns out while moving there’s a lot of variation, but there’s enough buffering that it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m sure if I were live-streaming video or some other heavy load it might start to fall over. The AC charging input has a high enough current to top up the battery while in operation too. I still have to test to see the maximum runtime but for a 30 minute stop for lunch or shopping it is more than capable. This morning I ran a test from full and over about an hour of basically standby while I was in a meeting it lost about 1/3 of the charge. That’s a good result to me and in line with what I both expected and want for a UPS.

So if you’re running a Starlink mini in bypass mode this is a good possible solution. I will eventually check it with the portable Allstar node 3.0 (using the Seeed Studio reTerminal), which I’m confident will work just fine. There are plenty of similar products out there so do your homework. And it looks like the price of the R-100 changes pretty often so keep an eye out for a deal.

By the way, there’s a variant of this power bank, I believe the R-101, that doesn’t include the figure-8 AC input, only an external power supply that uses the solar input port. While that’s fine for most applications, but it is one more thing to carry and one more thing to lose.