Starlink for RVs: Coverage, Power Draw, and What It Costs

Starlink works where cell towers do not, and that is the whole case for it. It needs open sky, not a tower. Checked on July 18, 2026, Roam plans start at $55 a month, the Mini kit starts at $199, and the dish draws 25 to 100W depending on which one you buy. Those numbers decide whether it fits your rig. Here is where Starlink beats cellular, where cellular beats Starlink, and why people who work off-grid usually end up paying for both.

Where each one actually works

Cellular needs a tower in range. Starlink needs a clear view of the sky. Those are different failure modes, and that is the entire argument for carrying both.

Cellular fails in the places boondocking is best: deep canyons, the back side of a ridge, national forest 30 miles from pavement. No plan fixes that, and no booster fixes it either, because a booster amplifies a signal that already exists and cannot manufacture one from nothing. What the coverage maps say about those places is its own problem, covered in what the coverage maps get wrong.

Starlink fails under canopy. Both the Mini and the Standard list a 110 degree field of view on their spec sheets, so the dish wants a wide cone of open sky, not a gap between two branches. Starlink’s own obstruction page says a terminal in the United States typically has dozens of satellites in view and reroutes around a blockage in 10 to 100 milliseconds, which is why a passing branch usually goes unnoticed. That is Starlink describing its own system, and for brief obstructions it matches what people report. Continuous heavy canopy is a different situation. In August, the shadiest site in the forest is often the worst Starlink site, and you end up choosing between a cool camp and a working one.

What Starlink costs, verified July 18, 2026

Starlink’s Roam page listed three plans on the day we checked:

• Roam 100GB, starting at $55 a month. Starlink’s own description calls this “approximately 1 week of typical use.” After the 100GB, you get unlimited low-speed data.
• Roam 300GB, starting at $80 a month. Aimed at people taking multiple trips a month.
• Roam Unlimited, starting at $175 a month. Unlimited high-speed data, and the only tier that includes international coverage.

Hardware is separate. The Starlink Mini kit page listed the Mini starting at $199 on the same day.

Three things to hold onto. First, every one of those is a “starting at” price, so the number in your cart can be higher. Second, Starlink changes Roam pricing, and it has done so more than once, so treat anything you read anywhere (including this page) as a starting point and open starlink.com before you buy. Third, Starlink’s page states plainly that the advertised speeds “are maximum available speeds, are not guaranteed, and will be slower during times of congestion.” That is the vendor telling you the number on the marketing page is a ceiling, not a promise.

Read the 100GB tier honestly. If Starlink itself calls 100GB about a week of typical use, then a full-timer on video calls is not going to live inside it, and the realistic full-time tier is Unlimited at roughly triple the price. Budget accordingly, and see what a month on the road actually costs for where that lands in the wider picture.

Two terms that genuinely help part-timers: Standby Mode pauses and un-pauses service at any time (Starlink’s page says this keeps emergency messaging available for a small monthly fee, and does not name the fee, so we have not verified it), and billing runs in one-month increments. There is also a 30-day trial with a full refund if you are not satisfied, which is the cheapest way to find out whether your usual campsites have enough sky.

Power draw, from Starlink’s own spec sheets

This is where people get caught. Per Starlink’s published specification sheets:

• Starlink Mini: average 25 to 40W.
• Starlink Standard (4X): average 75 to 100W.

Run that against a battery bank instead of a wall outlet:

• Mini, 8-hour workday: 200 to 320Wh. Over 24 hours: 600 to 960Wh.
• Standard, 8-hour workday: 600 to 800Wh. Over 24 hours: 1.8 to 2.4kWh.

A 100Ah lithium battery at 12V holds about 1.28kWh. A Standard dish left on around the clock eats most of two of those before you run a light or a fridge. The Mini over a workday is a far easier number, and for a lot of people it is the difference between adding solar and not. Our RV solar calculator will do the panel-and-battery math against whichever figure applies to you.

The DC advantage is bigger than the wattage gap

The wattage is only half the story. The Mini’s spec sheet lists an input rating of 12 to 48V, 60W max, so it runs on DC power directly off your house batteries. The Standard kit ships with a 100 to 240V AC power supply, which means on a battery bank it has to go through an inverter.

That inverter costs you twice. It takes a conversion cut on every watt-hour that passes through it, and it draws its own idle load whenever it is switched on, which on many units is 15 to 25W doing nothing at all. So a Standard dish that reads 75 to 100W on paper is a larger real draw at the battery than the number suggests, while a Mini fed straight from 12V is close to its rated figure.

For most RV and van setups, that makes the Mini the default choice and the Standard the exception you make on purpose, usually because you want the bigger dish’s performance at a fixed base camp with shore power or a large solar array. If you are sizing that array from scratch, start at /rv-power/.

Sky view is a siting decision, not a purchase

Starlink’s app includes a tool that previews an install location and shows a live obstruction map after setup, and Starlink says it measures uptime at 10 Hz and reports outages down to 100 milliseconds. Use it before you level the rig, not after. The practical habit: park, deploy the dish, check obstructions, and only then unhitch. Moving 200 feet into a clearing is a two-minute job at 2pm and a miserable one at 8am with a meeting starting.

A 15m (49 ft) cable ships with both kits, which is enough to put the dish in a clearing while the rig sits in shade. That cable is the most underrated part of the box.

One more constraint worth knowing before a trip: in-motion use is supported on Roam plans, but Starlink’s page says “in select areas,” not everywhere. Do not plan a driving day around streaming.

Why full-timers end up carrying both

Because the failure modes do not overlap. A ridge that blocks every tower for 40 miles has no effect on a satellite passing overhead. A canopy that puts your obstruction map in the red often sits within 2 bars of an LTE tower. Buy one, and you have quietly agreed to camp only where that one works.

The usual setup is Starlink for camp plus a cellular line on whichever carrier covers your routes, and the choice of that carrier matters more than the price of it. How cellular plans actually behave covers what “unlimited” means in the carriers’ own network management documents, which is not what the ads imply.

If your income rides on this, working remotely from the road has the bandwidth numbers and the habits that matter more than the hardware. For the shorter overview of both paths, start at internet while boondocking.