I wonder if the antenna is expensive or if it's the other electronics in the terminal? I assume it uses a phased array. I also assume most phased arrays are pretty cheap.
The antenna or the array antenna should be pretty cheap because they're technically passive devices. The expensive parts, however, are active circuitry namely the down conversion circuitry and signal processing for beam steering. The trick is to reliably down convert the signal to low frequency baseband by maintaining its amplitude and phase in which information is encoded since frequency is ephemeral (can be changed and manipulated without losing the information). According to ChatGPT-4, the user bands for Starlink satellites are mainly using Ku-band for downlink between 10.7 to 12.7 GHz (satellite to user) and 14 to 14.5 GHz for uplink (user to satellite).
They are 3 ways of doing the frequency conversions namely superheterodyne (Single-IF), Direct conversion (Zero-IF) and the latest Direct RF sampling. The complexity is decreasing, hence the price is decreasing as we go from former to latter. Due to the relatively high frequency of Ku-band, Starlink antenna systems probably also utilize multiple down conversions or multi superheterodyne which make the price to be rather expensive due to the increased complexity of the circuitry and signal processing.
Now due to the rapid improvement in RF SoC/chip design by company like ADI and TI, we now have RF transceiver chip that can perform Direct RF sampling utilizing high speed ADC/DAC operating in Ku-band. Thus we can expect the price to be going down even further. I suspect the decreased in manufacturing for the antenna price is not so much due to the their better manufacturing iterations, increase yield, etc but mainly due to the recent availability of this high speed Direct RF sampling transceivers but I can be wrong.
