Satellite internet
If you have a Starlink dish, Sensa reads it directly and gives you two cards on the Network tab of the Habitation dashboard: what the dish is doing now, and the handful of settings worth changing from inside the van.
What the dish is doing
The first card is live status. Rows appear only when your dish reports them, so a Mini and a High Performance show what each of them actually has.
| 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.
Changing the dish's settings
The second card is the settings you would otherwise open the Starlink app for. As with the status rows, a setting only appears if your dish has the hardware for it, so nothing on the card is a control that quietly does nothing. On older dish firmware that does not report its settings at all, the card is left out rather than shown empty.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sleep schedule | Turn the dish off for part of every day. A dish draws real power, and overnight is usually the cheapest time to stop paying for it |
| Sleep start and Sleep duration | When the sleep window starts, and how long it lasts |
| Stow dish | Fold the dish flat for travel, and unfold it again |
At the foot of the card, Restart dish reboots it. The dish is back in a few minutes.
On a motorised dish, Stow dish is what folds it away. There is nothing in Sensa that stows it 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. Everything else on the card still works exactly as before.
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, expand 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, obstruction and packet loss, so you can judge a parkup before you settle. 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.