DC current requirements for RBS20 and RBR20

[k7wxw]

I just installed an Orbi router and two sats, mostly to reduce RFI that my old cobbled together system of wifi, MOCA adapters and ethernet was generating. The Orbi boxes come with 12VDC, 1.5A switched mode wall warts that I would like to replace with linear (RF quiet) power supplies. Here's the question: do the RBS20 or RBS30 really need 1.5A? Linear supplies that size are big and heavy and I'd like to use smaller 1A supplies if I can.

 

[e38BimmerFN]

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Or...ent/td-p/1683917/jump-to/first-unread-message

 

[Razor512]

If you have some perf board and a male and female DC jack, you could build a simple breakout board for the power input. Then simply run the power through your multimeter (set to the 10 amp setting) and measure how many amps the device is actually using during startup, and when running a stress test such as iperf https://iperf.fr/

Netgear does reuse power adapters on multiple devices, and they always leave a decent amount of headroom in the power delivery. e.g., they will never try to pull 1.5 amps out of a 1.5 amp power supply.


Another thing to consider is some linear power supplies will experience a larger voltage drop when you get close to their limit.

Netgear also tends to have quite good power supplies. when I was repairing a cheap FM transmitter that I got from ebay (has no input filtering) most 12V adapters would cause a high noise floor when connected to the 12V FM transmitter, but when using the 12V adapter that goes to my R7800, I get almost no noticeable difference between it and hooking it to a 12V battery, and effectively no difference at all with a 100 uF electrolytic cap, and 2.2 uF ceramic cap on the power input, (at least when viewing the signal using the RTL-SDR.