Satellite internet
If you have a Starlink dish, Sensa reads it directly and shows it on the Network tab of the Habitation dashboard, with its power button, Restart and its sleep window.
What the dish is doing
Tap the dish on the Network card to see its readings. Rows appear only when your dish reports them, so a Mini and a High Performance show what each of them actually has. Day to day it keeps to Status and Service; turn on Nerd Mode to see the rest.
| Reading | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Status | The dish's overall state |
| Connected | Whether it is online right now |
| Service | Why it is not serving, when it is not: no active account, roaming restricted, a blocked area, or moving too fast |
| Sleeping | The dish is asleep on the schedule you set, rather than broken |
| Uptime | How long since it last restarted |
| Power | What it is drawing at this moment |
| Battery | Charge level, on a dish that has a battery |
| Latency, Download, Upload | How the connection is performing |
| Speed limit | On a metered plan, whether you have used your priority data |
| Obstruction | How much of the sky is blocked |
| Packet drop rate | How much traffic is being lost |
Service and Speed limit are the two worth knowing about. Between them they separate "the dish has a fault" from "your plan will not let it work here" and from "you have used your fast data this month", which otherwise all look the same: a connection that is not working properly.
Sleeping and restarting
A dish draws real power, and overnight is usually the cheapest time to stop paying for it. Sleep turns it off for part of every day: switch the schedule on and pick when it Starts at and Ends at, in 15-minute steps. Move the start and the end stays where it was.
Restart reboots the dish. It is back in a few minutes.
Both are on the dish's box on the Network card and in its popup. If Admin Lock is on, they ask for the Settings PIN first.
Stowing the dish
On a motorised dish, a small card on the Network tab carries Stow dish, which folds it flat for travel and unfolds it again. A dish that cannot stow does not get the card.
There is nothing in Sensa that stows the dish for you when you set off, so it stays part of your own leaving-site routine.
Settings you change in the Starlink app instead
Snow melt, levelling, holding off an update for three days and the hour the dish may restart itself are no longer offered here, and were removed in August 2026.
Starlink's own software decides which settings a device on your van's network is allowed to change, and it refuses all four. They were controls that could only ever fail, which is worse than not offering them, so they have gone.
Change those four in the Starlink app on your phone. Nothing else about your dish is affected, and Sensa goes on reading it as normal.
Its power draw, in your eyeline
A dish is usually the largest discretionary load in a van, and it is the one you might genuinely turn off to save power. So you can put its live draw in the header bar, alongside the temperatures, and see it on every screen.
Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, tap the cog on your dish's row, and turn on Show Power In Header. It takes effect at once, and turning it off removes the chip again.
The chip reads in watts, to one decimal place. It is per device, so if you have more than one dish you choose separately for each.
Where else the dish shows up
- The Cab dashboard's Internet tab scores the connection on latency, packet loss and whether anything is blocking the dish right now, so you can judge a parkup before you settle. The obstruction percentage is still shown beside it, but it is a long-run average of the sky the dish has seen, so it no longer drags the score down at a spot where the link is working well. Throughput is deliberately left out of that view, because it reflects what you happen to be downloading rather than what the link can do.
- The Sleep scene turns the dish off along with the inverter and the water pump. See Scenes.