I wouldn't be surprised that the Starlink dish can melt snow. It's literally an antenna that shoots high energy microwaves into space over many hours.

100W of microwaves according to another comment here. By contrast your microwave oven might emitting 800W for a few minutes.

Unlike the few watts of a Wifi router or phone, it emits high power electromagnetic radiation.

It's definitely something you attach to your roof and pointed at the sky, not something you want to be sitting in front of for hours.

> It's definitely something you attach to your roof and pointed at the sky, not something you want to be sitting in front of for hours.

I could say the same thing about a light bulb, couldn't I?

It heats your skin slowly, and it can't get far enough into your eyes to hurt your retina or anything.

Lightbulbs are visible light and infrared. It heats the surface of your skin.

Microwaves penetrate your skin and even your skull. It's heating your brain like cooking food in a microwave. Yes, it's non-ionizing, but there's a relationship between heating, inflammation and cancer. And it's wrong to ignore it.

Just take simple precautions like not sitting right in front of a 100W space antenna, but instead mount it on your roof.

Starlink terminal transmissions are 14+GHz. It all converts to heat within a millimeter or two. It can't heat your brain. (And even if it could, "like cooking food" is a bad way to describe the fraction of a degree you'd get.)

Also the actual signal from that antenna is 20 watts or less. If it heats you, that's going to be because it's warm.

That's for the schooling me with Cunningham's Law with the fact the frequency wasn't ~2.4GHz, and the signal power was way less than 100 watts.

Thanks*

There's absolutely no heater inside it, as this great disassembly/destruction shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo

Depends on your definition of a heater, certainly there's no separate heating module but here's[0] a SpaceX team member saying it has 'self heating capabilities' in their reddit ama.

[0]-https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...

700+ chip count makes some heat.