Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit | Hacker News Reader

Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

arstechnica.com

317 pointslakis492 comments

Starlink is in beta. The entire purpose of the beta is to find stuff like this. They found something, and I'm sure that the next iteration of this before it goes to mass market will account for it.

You're just seeing the system work.

> You're just seeing the system work.

This sounds reasonable, and you make excellent points. But the important fact we all have to remember in these discussions is not the details, but that SpaceX is run by Elon Musk.

Whoa. What guy? This thermal issue is critical.

And it's a failure in a beta, with a sample size of one. As the poster upthread points out, this is the kind of failure you want to find in a beta test of a new product.

But right right... I forgot. Musk.

I couldn't agree more. But it seems some people are reading my comment literally.

(HN really, really doesn't like sarcasm. But this particular story just absolutely drips with irrational hate and really deserves some. Good grief, new product has correctible flaw!)

Always worth remembering that HN has an international audience.

English is terrible enough before we start butchering it by playing with intent.

(Said with love and encouragement; I've forgotten about not using sarcasm here too).

The link is mostly a honeypot for Elon Musk haters. I wonder if they have bothered looking at the operating temperatures of other satellite Internet dishes?

A simple search will net you heating and cooling devices for satellite dishes. If you face more extreme temperatures, you need only go buy a heating and cooling unit.

http://www.dishcamo.com/dish_heater.htm

Surprisingly, the heating element built in appears to be pretty solid, or at least that's been the responses on /r/starlink.

You're definitely right that people are hating on it. Most of the people I know in real life that knocked it have access to land based internet. Once you get out into rural areas where 4g is the basis for your internet, it's amazing.

And it's not like 4g hotspots and old cell phones don't overheat either.

Yes, my iPhone went into thermal shutdown sitting by the pool on a 90 degree day but I don’t see a hacker news discussion on it…

Your iphones primary environment isn't outside under the sun for half of every day of the year though either.

I have yet to see cellphone towers shut down because the summer is too hot.

I have yet to hear about the starlink spacecraft going into thermal shutdown in Arizona.

You should work in network operation. I have seen BS go down for so many reasons…..

Heh. But whatever it was, the impact on the end user was low. When I lived in Miami there would be cellphone trouble on weekend nights, never in the midday heat!

You get an actual 4g router, not a phone, and they actually worknwell

It's far easier to build a heating unit than a cooling unit.

Thermodynamics FTW

Well, in general cooling something down is much more complicated than heating it up.

For one you need a sophisticated reverse heat engine, for the other a piece of wire with high enough resistance.

> For one you need a sophisticated reverse heat engine

This is a very obtuse way of saying “refrigerator”, which is a type of heat pump.. a technology over a hundred years old. The simplest refrigerators/heat pumps are pretty simple — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

That's a subsystem with three major sections, a working fluid, and its own heat rejection requirements. A resistive heater contains two parts - a properly placed wire and a switch.

Still say “sophisticated reverse heat engine” is a needlessly verbose way of saying refrigerator or heat pump. Also how sophisticated is something that is mass produced for devices sold under $100 in every big box retailer.

A refrigerator for a kitchen has drastically different constraints. The outside temp will always be something between 15-30 °C, the inside temperature will usually stay relatively constant unless you dump hot stuff in there.

Cooling for active outdoor technology has extremely variable outside temperatures (basically anything from -20 to 60 °C, or more if you take direct sunshine into account) and a constant generation of heat to be taken away.

Still I can't really think about any mass produced consumer item that includes a heat pump and is not either part of building/car cooling/heeting or a refrigerator itself.

Like mobile base stations of course have AC units and some amateur astronomers use peltier cooled sensors, but I would hardly call these mass produced consumer items.

Many of these folks are used to internet going out because the wind is blowing too hard, or it's raining, or snowing, or a cow is stepping on the fiber link.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/how-cows-caused-s...

People are always surprised when I describe how bad the internet connection I have is here in the UK. 3meg down 0.2 up. If it rains or is too windy the connection dies. I’ve spoke to bt and openreach hundreds of times but it never gets any better. I’m the last house on the end of a copper line and there is no interest in fixing it. Four years ago the village was supposed to get fibre, recently “delayed” again. I rely on the 3G signal, which isn’t much better tbh.

My Starlink arrives next week :) I’m so exited to be able to finally download some photos I put on google drive a couple of years ago.

Yeah, British internet can be fairly inconsistent. I'm in a rural-ish area and can get 100 megs down on a fibre-to-the-house connection, but when I lived in an actual town I would be lucky to get 2 megs down on a good day. I literally ended up doing everything over 4G back then because the fixed internet connection was just abysmally bad and Openreach never cared enough to fix it.

The more you hype something, the more susceptible it is to criticism. It's not necessarily that people are Musk haters (although some are I'm sure), it's that it's been hyped to hell, by Musk and others, so problems will be hyped also.

You can't have a lot of positive attention without a corresponding amount of negative attention when something goes wrong.

Yeah, it’s probably a mix.

https://www.highspeedsat.com/dw7000.htm

-30ºC - +55ºC

The previous link was only for heating dishes. I wonder if there are any products out there for cooling dishes. There are products out there for Dish TV receivers but Starlink has circuits in the dish itself. Seems more like the dw7000 above.

That's a de-icing system. Starlink dishes have the opposite problem, they get too hot because they have to dissipate 100 watts electric energy plus the heat from the sun and the nearby rooftop.

OK, maritime outfitters will sell you a climatized radome, which will set you back a few grand. Proper engineering costs money (can't have radar fail in the middle of the Strait of Malacca), and that's why Elon relies on his army of fanboys, Elon's outrageous conduct is part of marketing.

> OK, maritime outfitters will sell you a climatized radome, which will set you back a few grand.

To be fair, isn't the maritime market a bit like the aviation market, where a pack of 6 disposable AA batteries potted in a pack will cost you $43? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1YjGLwfYSQ&t=37)

On land with a good supply of fresh water (so, not in drought regions) I think you could probably cool a dish for a few dollars of parts with an open-loop cooling system. I'm not sure how much water you would actually need though, it might be an unconscionable waste in the regions that are prone to these sort of temperatures in the first place.

To be fair, isn't the maritime market a bit like the aviation market, where a pack of 6 disposable AA batteries potted in a pack will cost you $43?

Fair point, a portable AC sets you back 150 dollars or so, so with outdoor proofing and all, you can build a passable cooling system for 250 dollars. That would be the proper engineering solution, but it wouldn't look cool, like the steering yoke in the recent Tesla.

What sort of magical solution is there though for the price of the dish? If the ambient temperature is 50 degrees C, you need cooling. It looks like the Hughes dish is a little better at 55 degrees C. Looks like the expensive solution is that randome irrespective of the particular dish. The cheap solutions seem to be myriad. Relocating it, putting it under shade, sprinklers, fans.

An Elon Musk hater here:

Starlink provides an excellent example of a deeper problem I see with new technology vs. traditional infrastructure. We know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all over the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on infrastructure.

Elon Musk (and the likes) see an opportunity to disrupt this simple answer and make money selling a different unproven solution that has the potential to be at best as good. For me this is bad news. If politicians get sold by the likes of Elon Musk, it will stand in the way of traditional proven infrastructure and—in the case of starlink—fast and affordable broadband connection for rural communities.

It’s hard to fault SpaceX for realizing a market opportunity here. If they can bring decent Internet to rural areas who don’t currently have broadband access, that’s just mutually beneficial for SpaceX and those customers.

When (if) those customers ever get broadband access by additional infrastructure investment, SpaceX will need to find a way to provide better value. I’m not sure I understand how this is a bad thing.

After investing[0] billions per year in traditional communications companies, we still have people where the only way they can get service is by laying the fiber themselves. States have also been trying to invest in expanding fiber, but traditional companies have been just pocketing the money and blocking anyone else from improving things (eg: google fiber).

Starlink seems to be a very cheap option in comparison, even if it has LoS and overheating problems.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tag/rural-broadband/

Other countries seem to be able to get fast internet connection with traditional infrastructure to small towns and communities. Why not America?

>We know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all over the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on infrastructure.

The problem is that this view means you need politicians who care enough about the issue and many simply don't. I like there being a solution that eliminates a lot of the political factors that cause endless dither and delay over building traditional infrastructure for rural broadband, and for that matter my opinion of Elon Musk is still higher than most of my country's politicians when it comes to technological policy.

There's also another important use-case for things like Starlink which is people who can't be reached by traditional infrastructure. These are people who live in remote parts of the world where governments won't consider investing in infrastructure on grounds of cost, and people who live a nomadic lifestyle (liveaboard sailors for example, and van dwellers depending on where they go). I don't think they should be cut off from the internet because of an overly sceptical attitude towards new approaches.

Stepping back, low Earth orbit satellite constellations appear to be a better solution than fiber for these remote locations. Then the debate becomes whether it should be a public, private, or private but publicly funded program.

Amazon and OneWeb are also looking to build constellations. It isn’t a StarLink question.

Why are you showing links to heaters? You ask if other manufacturers have this problem, then you provide links to the exact opposite problem which is freezing temperatures. The answer to your original question is no, other manufacturers do not shut down anywhere near this temperature.

I replied to my own comment with another manufacturer with this problem. You are right that my link was to deicing but another comment said that randomes are a maritime solution to both heating and cooling.

Oh, and apparently there are heatsinks you can buy for satellite dishes.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Tokyosat-Radiator-Alu...

Radomes cost over $10k at these frequencies, so that's not a solution.

If your engineering team had to wait for a product failure to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot, what on earth else are they missing?

They put a non-automotive grade LCD in Teslas. I assume because they thought they knew better. I suspect hubris is at play more than full-on incompetence.

Just curious, what are the differences between normal LCD's and automotive-grade LCD's?

Automotive-grade LCDs don't burn out and melt at the temperatures commonly found in ... well, automotive environments. Like your car sitting in a tarmac car park all day in sunny weather with the windows closed.

Tell that to my 2012 Suzuki SX4 radio LCD, it won't work when its warm out.

I've seen my 2017 Mazda LCD go into protection mode a few times. It also dims before that stage.

Certified operating temperature range would be one.

One thing that was shocking to me when I looked this up myself is the temperature range of a car dashboard where the LCD is mounted. It can get ludicrously hot in the summer if the car is parked under the sun[1], like 80-90 C (180-200 F) hot.

[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...

SpaceX and Tesla are separate companies with different employees. "They" did not put anything in Teslas.

Separate companies with the same CEO, (some) shared board members, joint projects, cross sales of services and equipment, loans of employees, etc. Surely there's significant culture bleed.

I wish more of the SpaceX culture bled into Tesla then.

Move faster, break more things? Tesla delivers far more refined products than SpaceX

Yes, break more things on testing grounds. Keep iterating until the thing works well.

SpaceX, paradoxically, has easier time experimenting and partially failing, because they mostly haul machines. Every Tesla car, OTOH, has a human pilot.

The put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing.

The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and they weren’t at a stage in their company where they could design their own.

They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they were determined to bring into the world given the technical constraints of the age. I’d say overall it paid off.

IMO it wasn’t arrogance.

Yeah, and their typical failure mode, yellowing around the edges, still looked better than a lot of other vehicles from its era.

I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.

I agree, it wasn't arrogance.

Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.

Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

"The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones.

Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.

Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too.

People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.

This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have problems, but given the use case it's not really going to be that bad".

Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous.

The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.

People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail.

the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.

A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...

Sure, fine. But the MCU still crashes on my (very yellowed screened) unit regularly, randomly. Right now, that doesn't cause me to crash: autopilot stays engaged. The car continues to function. There's even a low-level beep when autopilot is disengaged, even though all other audio fails. Blinkers still work. Etc.

But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I can't place the car into park or reverse. With the shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure hope that's the case.

The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done, ever. So many people are going to end up with completely shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the airbags deployed while they're turning and have their arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about the stalks, though.

There are park and reverse buttons on the center console too. (not just the screen)

> Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.

Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C they needed to do at least a review of environmental constraints and operational ceilings, and the most rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily get to 80C.

It's a heckin' internet uplink dish, not a mission-critical piece of engineering lives depend on (if Starlink is your only way to call emergency services, you ought to have a radio backup).

I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking about Teslas shortcuts.

But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.

The correct order is:

1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations

2) Give business advice on (1)

> Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.

An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.

+1. This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line, because you can reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship updates before they come into play. But when you sell someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20 years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later.

The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly.

There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering).

In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.

> This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line ... because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.

I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard.

The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.

You can still replace parts in physical products. For example, the yellowing screen of the Tesla could have been replaced no questions asked with an automotive version once available. It is just so more expensive due to logistics and assembly.

Selling something you know breaks within a short amount of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to replace it is fraud.

It wasn't designed for a car, but they did run additional tests on it.

> he put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing.

No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t.

This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software.

So yes, it is arrogance.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...

It wasn't an unknown that the screen might yellow in high temperatures. A smaller LCD would have been a different product, and certainly an inferior product given a (diagonal) 17 inch non-automotive screen would have had to have been an (at most) 10 inch screen. It was a tradeoff, not arrogance (maybe arrogant for them not to know that jonathankoren would disapprove of it 8 years later).

> Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts

I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.

They didn’t need that size, they could have gotten by fine with a smaller size just like every other car company.

This is just the wrong angle to look at this. The big screen was one of the features that was talked about the most. It was genius marketing, and also part of why the car felt like the future.

a lot of things can feel like the future when you don’t have to support them through their lifetime.

And they could have "gotten by" with a diesel engine just like every other car company. that's a useless comment to make. We are tired with getting by. we need companies like Tesla/SpaceX that are willing to push the envelope with simingly stupid and useless ideas. After some time people will wander how past generations have gotten by without what they have just like now most of us can't go by without access to smart phones whereas 15 years ago everyone just went by fine.

I wonder if they are doing that for other components too, or just the LCD?

IIRC there were issues with the flash memory in the media unit (afaik that means the whole giant center screen) where it would fail to boot after a while because the flash chips were failing. They actually issued a recall for that one at least.

I don't know, so this is a genuine question, but is that a safety-critical part in that case? If it's not it's still not ideal, you want to make sure that your parts will happily survive the car's environment, but it's not as bad.

> Safety concerns revolve around cars losing their display for rear-facing cameras (now required by law) and consumers complaining it’s impossible to defog windshields with the center console inoperable. [0]

> Another complaint said the failure disabled safety monitors associated with Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot. [1]

It looks like losing access to the touchscreen does actually effect safety components, and driver's abilities to use them. (Though I'm not clear on to what extent - driver's might just need to crack out the manual to see how else to defog, for example.)

[0] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/06/tesla-investigated...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/u-s-probes-t...

Safety critical? Who knows, but probably depending on how you want to define "safety critical." Tesla runs practically every user control through the touch screen. Climate control, lighting, wipers. Did they design with reasonable fail-safes? I wouldn't want to bet my life on it.

I doubt that everyone on the team missed the fact that electronics get hot outdoors in the summer. Rather, they probably chose to launch a product that breaks when it gets hot, because it's an easy problem to fix later. Now that something is out in the field, they can debug their network, satellites, RF hardware, installation instructions, management applications, and figure out what kind of customers want to buy this thing -- all in parallel while some tiny EE team redoes the BOM to use better-spec'd components. Everyone at the company now has a ton of work to do to produce the next version, taking into account real-world feedback as they do it. Would it be worth blocking all those projects another 3 months just so that some guy in Arizona gets more Internet uptime on the hottest day of the year? Probably not. It sucks to invest in an early product and have it break on you, but it's also probably not possible to have a company that releases a totally flawless product on day 1. If you demand perfection, what you are really demanding is for the product to never exist.

(It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available. You may have noticed that there's been a pandemic going on for the last year or so, and that's hurt the availability of many electronic components, among other things.)

This is exactly the whole "agile" vs traditional/waterfall mentality, scooters before motorcars, etc., put into practice. Hardware is hard.

> It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available

Fun fact: they don't make (commercially available) GPUs, NICs, pretty much any PC components rated below 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either pay out the nose for some serious engineering, or you just roll the dice. We rolled, and it turned out fine. That won't always be the case.

What Spacex is doing is smart, not sloppy.

> We rolled, and it turned out fine.

Who is “we”?

Company I worked for. We built an aerial multispectral imaging system for monitoring seals, polar bears, and other mammal populations. It's 3 high power rugged PCs, semi-affixed in a shock mount case in the tail of a Twin Otter. There's no hangars available at the airbases in e.g. Kotzebue, Deadhorse, Utqiagvik, so it sits on the tarmac and experiences some intense temperature swings.

It's made it 2 winters and dozens of missions so far.

The customer is NOAA and they really don't have oodles of cash to spend on this thing, so it's mostly commodity hardware. Initially we designed this whole crazy insulated case to keep it from getting too cold, but the aircraft engineers nixed it due to fire hazards. The airframe isn't airtight so it gets most of the brunt of the diurnal swing.

Sounds like a fun job!

It was brilliant fun and also the most stressful period of my life, due to it being a bit far out of our core competencies at the time, delays in getting the camera hardware we had to interface with, limited staffing, and a comedy of other errors. Also the PM gets insanely airsick. As a result of all that, I got to go up to Kotzebue, AK with the PM to do the integration testing.

So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying for my resilience to motion sickness.

Stressful AF. So worth it.

You could also add a heater.

And, fwiw, that's exactly what SpaceX did to make Dishy tolerant of low temperatures (and to help it clear snow/ice from the dish). There's just no equivalent solution for high temperatures.

I used to think it was just a matter of product cost to do active cooling... really the problem isn't the temperature it's the dew point! Which I guess could probably be solved with enough hardware, planning, and cost as well... but a ridiculous amount compared to adding an electric heater for the opposite problem.

Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get colder than ambient not just fans or whatnot)?

a fridge

I mean electronic device, things in a fridge/freezer generally don't mind condensation or deposition.

A pump, a home depot bucket in shade, some duct tape and tubing would probably be sufficient.

Thermoelectric coolers can cool below ambient. You can get them for CPUs, I saw one on a Linus YouTube video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

Sort of. Thermoelectric coolers transfer heat from a "cold side" to a "hot side", and generate a lot of additional heat in the process. They can be part of a cooling solution, but you still need active cooling (like a heat sink and fan) for the hot side -- they don't just "generate cold" in the kind of way that a resistive heater can generate heat.

Which is what Google does in at least one of its data centers.

Is that for condensation control or because you're hitting the low end of your temp range?

It’s some data center in Nordic region, and during winter it gets so cold the servers can’t heat the place.

It'll be incase of an emergency shutdown.

Can't have the servers freezing when turned off.

Along the same lines, most hardware is designed under the assumption that you aren't significantly above sea level. Tons of medium-high voltage electronics have trouble with arcing once it turns on at 6000+ ft.

Considering most of humanity lives within an hour's drive of the ocean, it's not a bad assumption.

I'm interested why you are being downvoted, as you bring up a good point that aligns with what kortex was saying in their post.

edit: ahh, now I see it's because you're factually incorrect. It's only 1/3rd of humans that live within 100km of oceanic coasts.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-o...

arcing involves ionizing air, right? I would have expected that the breakdown voltage of air increases with altitude, due to decreasing density of air.

I would guess that it could be due to having more ions in air due to higher radiation levels.

It's actually the opposite (to a point, I think). Higher mean free path means more time to accelerate, then hit and ionize something else. That's how fluorescent tubes maintain discharge a meter long at measly voltages.

Radiation doesn't help either, as sibling commented - it creates ions making the initial breakdown easier, though it shouldn't make a difference for a continuous flow that involves innumerable ions.

Here ya go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIqK45nxcTo

He even explained it with balls and magnets!

Wide temperature (-40C to +85C) DIMM and SSDs are available.. Companies like ATP and Apacer carry them. Intel's Xeon D series are meant for wide temps.

-40C is very close to 0F (-32C) claimed above.

Update: -40F is -40C, oops, my bad, I don’t understand Fahrenheit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Um, -40C is -40F.

-40° Celsius is actually equal to -40° Fahrenheit, it's the temperature at which the two meet. 0° Fahrenheit is about -18° Celsius, did you perhaps multiply 0 by 5/9 then subtract 32 instead of the other way around?

The starlink dish is rated to -30C so it’s not that bad on the freezing side.

I wouldn't want to roll the dice when it comes to aircraft

The hardware is an imaging system (see other comment). It does not impact flight avionics in any way, and is on an isolated power source. The flight engineers wouldn't let us roll the dice on anything mission critical. They did make us redo a bunch of wiring harnesses to use non-smoke-producing wires, for example.

"Hardware is hard", I would say Manufacturing is hard.

That expensive part is NRE and only making a few tens of them, no production efficiency. With the volumes spacex will be hitting, efficiencies will certainly be found and NRE exceptionally better amortized.

No, it’s not. Ignoring perfectly predictable issues because you can’t even learn from recent history (millions of sat tv dishes in the nineties) or from industry (literally millions of cellular antennas) is not “smart.”

Also your example is a poor one. Engineering a systems solution for 0F is far easier than engineering for outdoors in the sun. Heat removal is a primary consideration and a 0F environment makes that far easier. In 0F your issue isn’t the cold, it’s the lack of humidity - again, something everyone who has more than two years in HW knows.

" Would it be worth blocking all those projects another 3 months just so that some guy in Arizona gets more Internet uptime on the hottest day of the year?"

Umm, yes?

A few hundred thousand guys from less overheated areas might politely disagree.

Yeah and with the data they gather, they might be able to work out geographically appropriate versions. Eg add a smaller AIO water cooler to a hot climate area version, or some other hardening. Maybe it makes sense to apply to all versions? Can't know until you have some data. Sounds like a great and sensible beta program to me. Avoids premature optimisation, lets you see what actually goes wrong (where, and in what conditions) without a massive effort up front.

For fuck sakes people this is ambient temperature, it does not require beta testing, it requires someone to get off their ass and look at over a century of temperature data that organisations like nasa have been collecting.

I see people here hate the idea of startups or engineers being responsible for any kind of reliable service even though lives depend on it, and as this "SV spirit" infiltrates more of our life even coffee machines don't work without an internet connection, a subscribtion and software update.

Completely prosperous

prosperous

I think that's the idea...

Why do you think the parts spec'd for this use case are available? The humble STM32 microcontroller has ONE YEAR lead times right now. If you're launching a hardware product right now, the supply chain dictates the design, not the other way around.

There is tremendous value in procrastinating that is still overlooked even in 2021. Fixing stuff and making decisions "just in time" means reaping value now and in the meantime.

There is an interesting article about this.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...

> Officially, SpaceX has said that "Dishy McFlatface" is certified to operate from 22° below zero up to 104° Fahrenheit. Temperatures reached about 120° yesterday in Martin's town of Topock,

> the Starlink app provided an error message saying, "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message said.

This is a problem when Arizona was above 100 degrees for 144 days out of the year last year.

I mean, the units didn't fail randomly, they shutdown.

They're beta, so it could be that the thermistor was placed poorly in a redesign, that they intended 122°C instead of °F, that they shipped with a dummy value used in an older fw during testing, etc.

All in all, a little embarrassing but not that significant, assuming this is certifiably not a scam.

I dont get the °C vs F one? with 122C youre covered for 122F. 122C = 251.6F and 122F = 50C

The device detects overheating and shuts down orderly.

If they planned to shut it down at 122C (which is indeed close to melting the solder) but by mistake made it shut down at 122F (not that much for most electronics), it would be a completely understandable blooper. It doesn't mean that the hardware isn't capable of operating at 122F.

122F is exactly 50C, so it's probably just a nice round number that was chosen for the shutdown temperature.

The stated temperature range tops out at 104F so I doubt it's a units issue, it's just not designed to stand up to temperatures a good portion of the US reaches over the summer.

Your missing optimization engineers who come behind the original engineers and optimize design with a focus on production cost over performance.

This often leads to some of the most spectacular failures, and unforseen issues.

Or someone fucked up

According to the article the dish literally reported to the user that it had overheated, and then it worked once it had cooled down.

Maybe not the greatest behavior, but clearly they already accounted for this.

Do aircraft engineers get a pass?

> the Bombardier CRJ aircraft used on some shorter routes have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...

Is that plane temperature, or air temperature in the shade? Probably the latter?

In the case of Starlink's dish, it's not clear which temperature they mean.

You may think this is a smart example, but you're mostly illustrating that you know nothing about aviation engineering.

The temperature limit for takeoff performance has nothing to do with the maximum temperature for electronics or other components. It's about air density decreasing which reduces the engine thrust as well as the maximum lift from the wings. So the warmer it gets the lower the maximum weight you can take off with and the higher the speed required before lift-off. At some point that's not safe anymore so the manufacturers only publish verified performance data up to a maximum temperature. You can't legally fly above that.

I think this particular issue might not be related to the safe flight envelope, although that was the hot take at the time... I should have added more context.

About a year or so after the article I linked above was published, Bombardier obtained ISA+40C certification for the CRJ700 and CRJ900 from both the FAA and TC. For the flights in and out of Phoenix, AZ, this meant that those aircraft have since been able to legally fly in temps of up to 123.8F. I don’t know the details of the certification upgrade, but my understanding is that there were no changes to either the aircraft or weight restrictions.

I don’t personally know anyone at Bombardier to know exactly why they didn’t certify the aircraft for ISA+40C to begin with, but given that there were apparently no changes to either the aircraft or the weight restrictions, this seemed very much a case of “your engineering team had to wait ... to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot”.

No. ISA+40 isn't a static temperature, it would be lower in Denver than at sea level. So in no way is that a warm electronics kind of problem.

We use ISA differences (the +40 you wrote) in flight performance calculations specifically. Not in any "aircraft too warm / cold" kind of limits, since those would be absolute numbers not relative to ISA.

They didn't wait. That's why it shuts itself down.

If you ever work on hardware, please talk to people who actually know what they are doing.

Anyone with a six week internship worth of experience would have tested this in an environment chamber.

It’s bad enough when idiot “first principals” MEs and EEs toss this stuff over and I have to deal with it, but it doesn’t fucking reach customers with faults that bad.

122° Fahrenheit is not "just" hot, a lot of things will have problems operating normally at that degree of heat.

Like in the area where I life a satellite dish reaching 50°C would be the rear exception. And if the alternative is not having proper internet at all other days, Startlink would still be the better option, even if there are a very few days where it fails during the afternoon of the day.

Eh, while 122F would probably be a rare temperature in most areas, judged by weather reporting, I think if you consider hyper-local effects it might not be too rare. If a dish were positioned over or near tarmac, it would experience weather several degrees hotter than the weather channel was reporting for that area. You'd also want to avoid placing it near the radiators of air conditioning systems, and other things like that.

Just something to keep in mind during installation I suppose, not insurmountable problems by any means.

I'm not sure, it seems like 110+F is pretty common nowadays in parts of the US. Adding a dozen degrees if the dish is in direct sunlight seems pretty realistic.

(not saying things won't break at that heat, just that it's not unrealistically high)

Sorry HW engineer here and I strongly disagree. You don’t ship hardware like this.

122F is only 50C. Most components can handle 85C so shutting down at 50C means the thermal rise is >35C. This is simply poor design.

Directv dishes are only rated for 140F or 60C[0]. Pretty close, but it clearly makes a difference in Arizona.

0: https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-direct....

That is not pretty close at all. You don't get ambient temperatures anywhere near 140F.

10C difference can be life or death

Speaking from experience in this same industry, this is the wrong way to look at it. They significant amount of engineering goes in to designing the ground systems such that it can tolerate all different types of environments. Currently with Starlink you are only seeing probably less than 5% of the environments that it would be rolled out in.

This is mainly due to how they are targeting RDOF areas to appease the government from winning all that money. Heat is one thing, but freezing temperatures are also very difficult to deal with. A deicer is common on high-end antennas to melt ice off in subzero temperatures.

I would be surprised if SpaceX changes the design at this point. To manufacture it antennas in the quantities that they need, they would have had to order a lot of the parts 6 to 9 months ahead of time in large quantities, especially given that they lose money on the terminal cost currently.

Preemptive thermal shutdown at this temp doesn't mean the units aren't designed to handle much higher. It means at this stage in the beta program they aren't ready to push the envelope with customer deployed hardware.

I always back off from the maximum limits for the gear I design then after years in the field and proven reliability you can remotely update it and push things a bit. And that's in production. This is beta

You don't know that. It's highly likely that they know it will do damage above those temps and are doing this to prevent damage. We will see in a year or so.

Responding with 'you don't know that' to a comment with no specific assertions, followed by 'its highly likely...' is a good example of 'irony'. We need more of those on US centric forums as a public education service. Thanks.

That's not how it works. It's well known that overheating electronics for an extended period of time causes them to fail. Especially ones that are not rated for large temp ranges. So to speculate that it's probably not a real issue and that they could just change it later needs more evidence.

They put the limit there in the first place, so why did they choose that temperature? Keep in mind these terminals need to last 5-10 years in these conditions. The motorized antenna is another part that is known to fail in extreme weather. Let's revisit this in a couple years when they have a decent amount of customers.

This shouldn't even be considered "pushing the envelope" it's not that hot.

Not that hot? It's 122°, 134° is the highest ever recorded on Earth, it's pretty hot.

122F air temperature or 122F device temperature? Intel CPUs shut themselves down at 212F.

In the shade.

The critical components are in the shade of the dish.

It has hit 122 deg in the shade in California both of the past two summers (not yet this year). That's in the shade. Put equipment on a dark roof in full sunshine and your dish becomes a solar cooker. Maybe they could sell it that way, and claim autonomous switching between two useful modes.

Fahrenheit not Celcius

That’s the air temperature. Dark objects in the sun heat up a lot faster.

We have a thermometer with a black plastic sensor (why?!) in our balcony. When the sun hits it in mid-morning, it gets up to 120°F, even when the actual ambient temperature is more like 65°F.

The dishes reportedly use around 100W. To safely dissipate such a power at higher temps, the design would need visible features (such as active cooling). Can't be done by just pushing software update.

Dial down throughput and reliability of the connection once enough people have bought into the original hype? Downgrading the performance seemed to be the popular solution for battery issues on phones not too long ago.

Things standing on pavement in direct sun can reach 50°C even without any added internal heat.

Phones aren't supposed to be used in such situations at all, so it's hard to carry over design lessons from there. Plus the radio frequencies used are new, unlike phones.

I guess users would have to strap on heatsinks and fans?

This. I don’t understand why people give these companies credit for being able to solve problems when they straight up ignored industry experience.

It’s like.. hey guys, the rest of the world has been designing satellite dishes for 40 years that addressed these problems including very low cost stuff from the satellite TV era. Why didn’t SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?

> Why didn’t SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?

Elon Musk famously works by „first principles“, which can indeed be roughly translated to „discover everything yourself“. The advantage is that it gives a clean slate for approaches considered impractical when the books were written.

> The advantage is that it gives a clean slate for approaches considered impractical when the books were written.

I'm not sure when that has ever worked out like that though. SpaceX built on a lot of existing aerospace knowledge. Tesla went through a lot of manufacturing hell trying to automate what turned out to be pretty unautomatable parts of manufacturing a car. As far as I know, whatever you think of the EV, the car manufacturing process Tesla has isn't uniquely good.

I guess Musk still wanted to find out anyways. His goal isn't merely building cars the simplest way possible. The guy is an educated physicist, he knows how stuff is usually done.

He has a BS in physics and never worked in the field a day in his life. No one would call someone with merely a BS a “well educated physicist.” This kind of thinking is cult-like attestations of faith.

To give them some benefit of doubt, all the industry experience is with geostationary sats. There is AFAIK little experience with tracking multiple quickly moving satellites using one antenna array.

122F = 50C

Means the antenna is not even outdoor rated

It could just be a cutoff that's set to low, this event does not tell that much by itself. It may turn out that the antenna fries itself at 60C and that's why it's turning off at 50. Or perhaps it could easily handle much more but it was set at that temperature for some reason.

SpaceX is known for using less than ideal products during test phases and working in parallel for the improved/final versions. it depends on what they are trying to test. and in this phase they are trying to test the network and will use the cheapest dishes that can do for this purpose.

I mean they practically used a water tower to test their starship engines. while in parallel they worked for rocket design just to test the first flight/landing and yet in parallel another deisgn for orbital flight tests etc. It seems a waste but this aproach has allowed them to be years ahead of ULA in rocket design. In this case I think they have demonstrated how they work and it's fair to assume that these problems are not engineering miscalculations but deliberate "go with the fastest thing you can test" decisions.

> SpaceX is known for using less than ideal products during test phases and working in parallel for the improved/final versions

That works for building rockets one at a time. It works less so for mass producing consumer electronics. Lines cost a lot of money to set up, and economies of scale exist.

Current dish (manufactured and supplied in April 2021):

  {
    "dishGetStatus": {
      "deviceInfo": {
        "id": "ut01000000-00000000-0000e586",
        "hardwareVersion": "rev1_pre_production",
        "softwareVersion": "db6b5d22-a642-43d6-bbec-97a816e3dbd6.uterm.release",

"rev1_pre_production" suggests the hardware will be subject to revision.

But also that it hasn’t been iterated on yet, after 8 months.

The reason I don't believe this is they are required to start providing service per the FCC by the end of this year. The antenna lead time is long enough to where they can't change the design now unless it was already in the pipeline.

It’s like when Tesla finally realized their imaging cameras weren’t worth crap during the winter with road crust all over them. Proving the moderately-self driving capabilities moot.

Ideal conditions during development may not replicate real-world use.

This is not something to find in a beta. This is a built-in feature and operating temperatures are not picked at random (they should not be, at least)

The _service_ is in Beta, but they are still selling a product to consumers, which means they are expected to follow normal engineering practies. This type of mistake is simply failing to meet best practices. I think it is roughly the hardware equivalent of using 3DES encryption, storing passwords in plain text, or allowing SQL injection. When you sell a device to consumers one of the considerations you have to consider is the operating range of that device especially if that device is used outdoors. Operating ranges are somewhat standardized, and most components will specify their operating range in the datasheet precisely because this is one of those fundamental considerations (like power requirements).

Examples: [1] The least stringent automotive standard I could find (AEC-Q100 grade 3) expects components to operate from -40°C (-40°F) - 85°C (185°F). [2] A pretty basic article on designing outdoor products suggests at least -20°C(-4°F) - 70°C (158°F).

This is a standard part of the design flow precisely so that you don't make a mistake as monumental as shipping an outdoor device that can't withstand the weather at the location you shipped it to.

[1] https://community.cypress.com/t5/Knowledge-Base-Articles/Mea... [2] https://suntsu.com/2017/09/15/the-great-outdoors-designing-p...

The reception hardware is the front end of an amazing aerospace engineering effort. Honestly, I am not worried at all, since these issues will get ironed out in new iterations of the hardware.

I am more interested in seeing the service achieve streaming latencies required for video games and trading. The day that happens, I have no need to live near a city anymore.

> The entire purpose of the beta is to find stuff like this.

No, it really isn't.

The point of a test is to verify that the system works as designed, and in case it doesn't then there's planned room to iterate out unexpected issues.

If a system designed to be operated on the outdoors is not designed to operate with temperatures above 50C then this is a collosal screwups and gross oversight, as this sort of stuff is well-known for decades.

https://web.mit.edu/parmstr/Public/NRCan/CanBldgDigests/cbd0...

You can bet the social media teams of Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of their ilk will be pushing this article through social networks hard.

Several posters on r/Starlink report that they had seen their dishes at more than 122F, when this topic came up a few days ago.

It's entirely possible that this story (and 122 hn comments so far) is about a dish with a loose heatsink, and not a product that always shuts down at 122F.

I also believe this was sitting on the ground on the tripod stand included in the box. I have ours roof mounted and noticed that the temperates were lower once mounted vs on the ground. That said our Farm isn't in AZ so it wasn't nearly as hot.

I think you're probably right about it being an edge case heatsink issue, one that was amplified by Dishy's placement.

Outside of that, Starlink has been great for us. Having a real connection rather than a 1 bar 4g connection has been life changing out at the farm.

I have Starlink and I'm in Pahrump, NV. We hit 111F today and my dishy is in direct sunlight on the ground so it was easily over 120F. Hell, my direct sunlight thermometer showed over 130F! Didn't go into thermal shutdown, no disruptions in service, and I didn't have to water it either.

Very valuable comment. If this isn't all, or even most, of the beta units then it may indeed be a loose heat sink or variance in manufacturing tolerance. This can be far more easily (and cheaply) addressed than a population wide issue.

It may also be the case that the thermal limit is currently set more conservatively than it needs to be. When every hardware unit is rare, costly and yet vital to gathering beta data, the choice to go extra conservative on thermal limits to prevent damage to scarce hardware deployed in the field seems logical.

It's sad Art Bell isn't around to test it out, he loved radio technology I'm sure he would have gotten a kick out of it :(

It can also be that it fails not due to absolute excessive temperature value, but rather after some heating-cooling cycles.

Hot summer is like 3-4 months over there, so about 100 very-hot-cold cycles per year.

Let’s see if it withstands that.

I am unsure, but it reminds me of the top gear episode where they intentionally destroyed the tesla for the script...

I've been looking at the other comments on this article, and there is a couple of points that I haven't seen address by others that I think are pertinent.

1) What was it that Starlink wanted to beta test with customers? It might very well be that they shipped hardware with know environmental weaknesses, so not to hold up other parts of the project. While taking a hit on the reliability in edge cases.

2) We know that there are some dishes out there that have heat issues, but we don't know how many dish hardware iterations they have done. The failing dishes could very well be early prototypes that have know issues. Which are fixed in later revisions.

Generally speaking I don't see these reports as worrying. I've just come of 10+ years of working on SW on (indoor), embedded hardware. Having alpha and beta hardware with issues are common, you need some hardware to run your test and SW development on. Even if it is fundamentally flawed and you have to throw it away because of those weakness later. For those that only have experience of building software. What you are seeing here, is a view into the sausage factory, and just because it feels messy and doesn't line up with your expectations. Don't mean that they are doing it wrong.

Hey, remember that time the entire power grid in Texas was crippled due to things going out of temperature range spec? Only in that case, it wasn't a beta product, it was critical infrastructure, that they were warned about and had ample opportunity to fix.

Getting components rated outside of "normal operating conditions" is a PITA on a good day, and impossible otherwise. You straight up don't design for every possible condition for the beta. That's bad engineering and a waste of time and money. Pick the number of 9's you want, estimate the conditions, draw a line in the sand, and build the damn thing, knowing damn well X% of customers will have an issue. Revise, fix it, refine your product and process.

Yeah but this isn't a 9. If it's really that low temp spec, it's gotta be kicking off most days for this and next month in AZ

What percent of customers don't experience thermal throttling in june? 90-99%? That's 1-2 nines.

E: another comment mentions some cities in AZ are the hottest places in the world right now.

There are no nines in 60%.

The (back of the napkin) metric I'm using is: Integrate the total uptime of each Starlink customer, for every customer. Divide that by the integral of time billed for each customers.

So if you have 10,000 users billed for 1 month, and 10 of them get thermally throttled for half a day, every day that whole month, that's 99.95% reliability this month.

122 is not that hard to hit in direct sunlight. All of Texas, Florida and Arizona, plus many other areas, will hit this number on a regular basis in the summer, so this is less than one nine in terms of no of customers.

I’ve worked on multiple projects where, at the early prototype stage, we limped along with off the shelf generic heatsinks, or even no heatsinks, for a phase or two because for some reason, it was long lead or high expense or low priority to fit a custom high performance heatsink. It sometimes seems like thermal work is as eschewed by electronic engineers as mechanical engineers often avoid HVAC.

I have always had a bizarre fascination with refrigeration engineering.

It is amazing all the things this has enabled for humanity.

Well, I’ve heard of preserving food and transporting vaccines, but as an enthusiast have you got any exotic examples for me?

Not OP but you might find it interesting to hear the thoughts of one of the most successful nation builders in history on air conditioning :-)

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

I always wished that the acoustic refrigeration tech ended up working out better with wider adoption.

Sound like the heat issues with the original X-box’s.

Sort of funny that the solution for streaming is to literally turn on a stream of water.

On a separate note, even if you don’t live in Arizona, a litmus test for good engineering is whether or not you see reviews of a product melting in Arizona. Yeah, melt. Literally.

Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US. If it doesn’t work here, it’s not mass market.

A good litmus test for good city location is whether or not melting objects/burns from touching objects is a daily concern

Yeah, I agree: the bug here is humans building giant cities in the desert.

Like southern California?

A lot more than the southern part.

If you say south California it's difficult to know how much inland you mean, because as you travel inland you go from hot to Hot.

You can measure a city in terms of how many days of productivity your family would lose if you didn't have AC or heat running full blast.

Our giant cities are on the coast.

Palm Springs? Yeah. The Inland Empire? Eeeeeh.

The LA Basin, OC, and San Diego? No. Their temperatures are kept much more sane by the ocean, and agriculture is the real problem for the water budget.

Not really Homo Sapians originated in the hot environs of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most early civilizations were in deserts, like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Their have been cities in deserts longer then there have been temperate climate cities. Humans are built for hot climates we just don't like them.

Mesopotamia and Egypt weren't deserts when those early civilizations got started.

Yes they were. They had rivers running through them. Civilization sprung next to the river.

This[0] suggests that the Sahara wasn't desert when ancient Egypt got started, though it depends on your definitions of those words I guess.

A timeline of Sahara occupation

22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.

10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.

9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.

7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populate...

afaik Phoenix as a massive city wouldn't exist without the air conditioning. There's "humans can tolerate high heat" and then there's "so hot that we need technology to make it liveable."

People have lived in the artic at -50, and in the desert since recorded history. Lifestyles, and buildings were different, that's all. No need for modern tech.

The same applies to the Gulf region. In fact, most people who can afford it leave the region during the summer.

Hahaha… yeah that’s probably a bigger concern.

“Product is fine, it is human civilization that is broken”, huh?

Human civilization is absolutely broken.

We're great apes running on on 50,000 year old hardware trying to cope with things invented after we were born: https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_wax_what_s_so_funny_about_men...

Building cities of several million people in regions with no water? Growing cotton, cattle, and world renowned golf courses? Yeah, that’s pretty obviously broken.

I grew up in Arizona. You regularly hear people saying, “well, there’s no water left to build but hey, people keep buying so we’ll keep building!”

Cheap land and subsidized water paid to give to a bunch of ranchers who despise socialism. “Broken” is being generous.

Networking vendors who know what they're doing literally put gear into ovens for extended periods as part of the DVT phase of testing, and put outdoor gear like cellular antennas/ptp wireless/ptp optical into stress environments prior to manufacturing. This again seems like the typical Musk venture, like the Tesla non-automative screens, where they didn't seemingly talk to anyone in the industry.

Yep, can confirm: when Jensen Huang presented new RTX 30xx series, he literally pulled 3090 from the oven.

https://youtu.be/q8ow_M5Hl2Q

The Phoenix area is really only has a metropolitan statistical area rank of 10 so it's about the size of Atlanta or the Boston area in terms of population. By GDP it's only 16 which is lower than the Detroit area.

It is a lot of people but it's not even close to being #4 once you account for desert cities being physically larger due to geography and political needs.

That said, SpaceX/Elon should not have sold the product anywhere where it could not withstand the environment.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it has a large population and is physically larger, thus it is less significant?

Sprawl isn't really a positive indicator. Cities exist to support their population and economic activity, not cover land.

That doesn't explain why it's less significant. It is a large cohesive city with elements of consistency, including its own culture. I have friends on the extreme east and west of the city. Less density is the result of insane central planning that resulted poorly, although predictably. That doesn't make it any less of a place.

the device works fine if you dont put it in an inuslating box open to the sun on top.

I’m always surprised how poor engineering gets exposed in products I purchase being an Arizona resident.

No, failing at 122F is not acceptable. If your hardware is exposed to outside conditions, it should operate easily below 32F, and well above 140F.

Considering that phones can operate below 0F and near 122F, that’s embarrassingly bad.

Same thing in vehicles. If you’re driving consistently at interstate speeds, you should be able to cool a cabin down below 72F while driving through 120F weather. Too many vehicles fail this, and frankly it’s repulsive for something you buy for 5-6 figures.

It’s not a safety issue like car regulation, engineering choices have costs.

Just because it doesn’t work in your environment doesn’t mean that it’s not suitable elsewhere and the burden of spec changes for your climate may make the cost go up for people elsewhere who don’t have the same requirements

Why build a product for everyone you're marketing to when you can cheaply build a product that works for some but still sell to all. Caveat Emptor after all. Hit my OKRs for the quarter, I'm going to the pub.

Eh, every design choice is a compromise between multiple variables. The cost has to be reasonable for there to be someone to sell the product to.

Because the cost would go up, and marketing becomes harder which makes it harder to get data and revenue to continue engineering.

Google shows me loads of industrial SBC devices that operate from -40 to +85C(!) that are under $200 USD.

It's not reasonable for Starlink?

Starlink dish costs $500, and has an antenna and motor.

$500 seems cheap for what it does, and that makes sense if it’s cost optimized but doesn’t have the broadest climate zone tolerance.

* This product is not intended for sale in AZ, NV, NM, TX, Parts of Utah, California, Idaho and the Dakotas in the summer, direct sunlight, and most roofs.

Is it common to have a car on the roof?

Where is it suitable then? I expect higher temps on roof of the farthest northern borders of the US.

Interesting. What phone operates at 0F? A few years ago I was in 15F conditions, the batteries in both my phone and my hiking partner's phone would not work at all. Going out briefly in 0F weather and pulling the phone out of the pocket of a warm jacket might be fine, but I'm doubtful a phone could continue to function when thoroughly cooled to 0F. If there's been a recent shift in phone technology, then I'd like to know more.

I’ve found this is very much a function of how new/good the battery is. I’ve been out skiing in ~0 degrees for a couple hours with a newer phone and not had trouble and I’ve had the same phone a year or two later go dead after 45min in 20 degree weather. My current iPhone 12 Pro lasted 45 min at -15 this winter and didn’t run out of battery. I keep my phone in an unheated water bottle carrier

My OnePlus One (old, I know) worked just fine this winter. I was able to read on my phone the entire 20 minute walk to the store and back. It's when I got home into the warmth that it would end up rebooting/saying the battery was empty.

It's possible that the phone generated enough heat to stay warmer though. The main problem with operating it was actually how cold my hand that's holding the phone gets since it doesn't move like the other hand does. I had to wear double gloves.

I’ve only had problems even well below 0F in Minnesota using old phones.

It’s just battery chemistry, current capacity and voltage are depressed by low temps.

Some phones aren’t engineered very well and regularly pull current near their battery’s capacity which is just poor design.

Of course 3/4 of the people responding to how cold can a phone get are from Minnesota. Lolol. Edit: I am also

Every iPhone I've had has worked fine outside in Minnesota winters. The phone uses energy to function and so probably is hotter than the surrounding air.

I live in MN, and if it’s cold out, I keep my phone next to my body somehow, like a pants pocket or inner jacket pocket in the chest area. This keeps the phone warm enough to work for a while at any temperature you would attempt to use a phone in (I don’t try to use my phone outside when it’s -20F because I don’t want to remove gloves, but 0F is fine) and if it’s too cold, you can rapidly warm it up by placing it between your legs/against your skin/etc.

In he summer, I don’t leave my phone in direct sunlight for extended periods or else it will overheat. Simply placing it in the shade or in a pocket prevents this. It usually only hits 100 here, so I don’t have experience with the 100-120F range and overheating.

Tl;dr Prevent your phone from reaching extreme temperatures and it will work fine.

Samsung used to guarantee their smartphones to operate down to -4°F. Not sure they still do. Having trouble finding current information online.

122F is 50C. How much of the world actually gets that hot?

AZ is currently the hottest place in the world at the moment. Not the upper range. The hottest place.

https://www.wx-now.com/Weather/WxExtremes?hottest=true

An object in direct sunlight is going to get hotter than the ambient air temperature.

especially when it's in direct sunlight sitting above roofing asphalt. Air temps can get up to 150 F without too much trouble on building roofs with a dark material.

A sizable portion of the world has reached 45 C or higher.

And you have to keep in mind the temperature is measured in particular ways, local temps near dark surfaces can get significantly higher.

Very few places have air temperatures that hot, but in most of the US the surface of a metal fixture right under the sun can and will exceed 122F.

Synthetic turf fields at your local park can get as hot 160 degrees pretty easily.

A piece of metal sitting in the sun can get that hot pretty easily in lots of places, even if the ambient temperature is much more reasonable.

Where I live in Florida, roofs routinely get hotter than that. Listed temps measure air temp, in a ventilated box 5 feet above grass. This is nothing like being on a roof in Summer here. We aren't a desert and we have tens of millions of people. This isn't going to work.

An aside, I was dating a woman from The North. She came here and we were travelling around the State. We stopped in Venice at a restaurant, I wasn't paying attention, and she just hopped out of the car barefoot! Only did that once, though.

This would be absolutely wild to do in “the North” during summer as well.

You are living in a city affected by global warming

Everyone is.

I live in America's wang. Another few decades of "Global Improvement™" and the USA will be a eunuch.

In the desert sun it will be higher than 50 degrees.

Palm Springs CA gets that hot, especially inside a vehicle.

You don’t put a star link inside a vehicle

That's true, but also -- an object sitting outside in the sun is going to exceed, or greatly exceed depending on the materials, the ambient temperature.

When the ambient temperature is 123°F (e.g. yesterday) where are you supposed to out it? Does the terminal work indoors? Even on cooler days in the low 100s your home's roof is going to be significantly warmer than 120f

I think the issue is that these dishes might be routinely mounted onto roofs, concrete pads, asphalt pads, etc. And, by requirement, in direct sun. Where the temperature could be significantly hotter than the air temperature you hear on a weather report.

Spain, or the deserts of Africa, California, Chile, or the southwestern US, as well as a good chunk of the middle east? What about anywhere along the equator?

I guess you could consider border states of Mexico as the same geographical region as the southwestern US, but those too. Anecdotal, but I've seen routine thermal throttling on macs in a border state with outdoor temperatures of 45, ambient indoor temperatures of 30-33, so you basically need either AC or some other external cooling system to manage more performance than a web browser and office apps.

I have heard anecdotal stories of the adhesive on rear-view mirrors of cars literally melting in the Phoenix sun (which can hit 120 F / 49 C or worse). So your story is not surprising at all, sadly

In addition to what people have said about the temperature of surfaces in direct sunlight, you have to account for the power the electronics are using. The aluminum backplate is serving multiple purposes, but judging by the gap pad they are using and RF electronics in general, it's likely a non-trivial amount of power.

This isn't the hottest month though. And the air temperature doesn't have to be 122F, just the dish.

it’s not about the air temperature. it’s surface temperature. i was at the beach the other day when it was only like 75 degrees but the sand was hot enough to burn my feet.

+55-56C is about is the hottest AIR temp you'll get globally. Pretty common to see telecomm gear that falls in line with this max temp. The +55C does not include heat from direct sunlight/insolation. Unless rated for much higher temps, you'll need a sun shade for your gear out in the field. Problem with Starlink is that with a sun shade you'd most likely lose line of sight to the sats or attenuate the signal badly.

Even in Northern Europe, a car parked in direct sunlight can easily get to 70C (160F) inside. In winter the same car may be expected to start up straight away without issues at -30C (-22F).

While most modern car much of the time manage to start at -30C indeed, "expected" is overstating it. You really need one with an engine heater.

Well I expect it of my car, and it hasn't let me down yet :-)

You live in a desert. I feel like the extremes of your environment are not a useful barometer for a reasonable operating temp.

I also live in the fifth most populous city in the United States. So, yeah, it is.

If anything, you should fully expect, at this point, that how we deal with extreme conditions in Phoenix is a harbinger of what is to come for other parts of the nation.

>I also live in the fifth most populous city in the United States. So, yeah, it is.

But that's still less than half a percent of the US population.

I guess we should also avoid rust proofing metals since most people don't live by the ocean, too.

I mean, I don't expect California cars to get undercoated, for example.

You need rustproofing wherever you put salt on the roads in winter, too

Just because lots of people made the same decision doesn’t make it smart or reasonable.

I just don't understand comments like this. 7 million people didn't decide to move here this year. Conditions in Arizona have dramatically changed over the lifetime of the state.

It doesn't make sense to live where you can freeze to death or don't have access to water, either, does it? Except those two scenarios include most Americans. Without modern infrastructure, it hardly makes sense to live anywhere.

Obviously 7 million people didn’t move there over the course of this year. If that’s what you thought I was getting at, I’m not surprised you were confused. Conditions have changed, but are people reconsidering their own decisions?

People don't decide where they want to be born.

Right, but your point seems to be getting at Starlink owing you a functioning dish in your climate, which is just kind of an odd take. There are dozens of products that are a bad fit for where I live.

If it makes economic sense, I'm sure they'll fix it or someone else will do it better eventually. If not, maybe the municipal governments can subsidize something that works there?

Nope, namely if you suggest they decide to move. But other taxpayers has to pay to help them continue comfortable live as they live now.

Please. The whole point of Starlink is that it's suitable for places where there is poor existing infrastructure. The desert tops the list! They also have service area restrictions for sign up.

Just say Tesla dropped the ball on this engineering prototype and V2 will work on the sun.

To be clear, I hope Tesla fails in everything they do. That wasn’t really the point I was making though.

I guess you hate Phoenix? Alice cooper, the Meat Puppets, stunning desert vistas?

People should almost certainly get over grass lawns, I know there is going to be huge problems with water, but afiact Phoenix recycles a huge proportion of their greywater, and this is a perfect use case for solar, molten salt, nuclear.

Hard to farm, I guess. Isn't there gold to mine too?

I guess you hate Phoenix?

Before reading this thread I didn't...

Millions of humans live there. And loads of other equipment operates. Maybe it's not really at the "extreme" point yet - since all the existing stuff has moved extreme further out.

I'd say maybe places where the air temperature regularly gets to >110 F aren't meant for human habitation

What's your definition of "regularly"? You're probably ruling out most of the US southwest. I made the same comment about people living in areas that are routinely >90% humidity, mosquito infested jungles and was totally slammed for it. People moving to those locations are the odd ducks to me. People born and raised there don't have a choice.

Really, it's not "don't live there," as humans have inhabited these conditions for thousands of years. But "don't live there and expect the same standard of living."

Contrast living in an adobe house/masonry house with no AC, taking a siesta/riposa in the hottest hours, and tolerating a bit of sweat, vs in-ground pool, AC set to 68, driving around mid-day in a rolling greenhouse.

It's a v1 beta. Maybe put it in the shade.

I'm pretty sure shielding a satellite dish from the sky makes it inoperable.

Shield it from the sun, not the sky.

As a Canadian, 32F seems like an oddly high lower limit to me. Things should operate down to at least -40.

Great point. I think this highlights the importance of what we consider acceptable tolerances.

fascinating how a post about inclusive design manages to have a blind spot that it does not consider. A wonderful demonstration on why diverse backgrounds in engineering is important.

Assuming you can keep something in the shade - does anywhere on Earth get to 140F beside inside forest fires, lightning bolts and volcanoes?

There is a substantial portion of the worlds population that lives months at a time where temperatures are regularly well below freezing.

Pavement.

A satellite dish doesn't do super well in the shade :)

Depends on the shade: http://www.dishcamo.com/fabric_dish_cover.htm

Line of sight to a satellite is only close to the sun for an hour or two a day, and only in certain locations on earth. It is entirely feasible to shade the rest of the sky.

My guess is that most people follow the directions to place the satellite dish with an unobstructed view of the sky. Thus, most of them are in the sun, regardless of how they are pointed and oriented.

Right. Snow tires, 4WD, and engine block heaters should be standard equipment on cars because obviously things should be designed to handle every environment they might reasonably encounter.

Block heaters are pretty standard on many new cars sold in the colder parts of Canada. So are all season tires.

As a sibling comment points out, block heaters are pretty standard in much of Canada. 4WD is not universal, but if there is a 4WD version of a particular model available, dealers will have a hard time selling the 2WD variant because enough people really do think 4WD is better in the snow. Snow tires are just a waste in the summer. What you do is have two sets of tires and swap them out in spring and fall.

I'm confused by your statement, anyway. Are you saying things shouldn't be designed to handle every environment they might reasonably encounter?

Side note: “40 below” is approximately where C and F intersect.

As a result, that temperature being “effing cold” is something US Americans and Canadians readily agree on.

It's not trivial to do things at tens of gigahertz at a wide range of temperatures. They didn't engineer it this way because they didn't consider the existence of Arizona, Texas, and Southern California. The thermal limits exist because RF is absurdly difficult. Maybe in 30 years we'll have TCXOs and other RFICs that make it trivial. Right now it's not.

tl;dr: Your phone doesn't have radios capable of talking on bands like 10.7–12.7 GHz (X/Ku band) and 37.5–42.5 GHz (Ka/V band)

It's not impossible either.

Cheap brute force hack: Have a chip burn power to heat the chip up to a constant temperature. This was done in one of the early precision band-gap references.

More expensive brute force hack: Stick a Peltier cooler on the thing, and servo to a well-controlled temperature.

Communication equipment is critical to work for emergency use, and coincidentally, emergency use is when you're most likely to see high temperatures.

tl;dr: Military equipment is required to operate like this, and has insanely high-performance RF equipment.

Military BGAN doesn’t get anywhere near this throughput in this package, so the size-performance is quite different there IMO, and isn’t a fair comparison to what Starlink is doing with their terminal.

The military is not a business with business constraints. If cost and power draw is no concern, then sure, it's possible. Hell, put a little AC unit beside the enclosure.

These are CPEs and they're sold at a tremendous loss already (a quick google says a whopping $2500 loss on a $500 price tag!). They won't stay in business long if they burn an extra $500 per device to make it suitable for a couple thousand extra customers.

Every one of their dev teams likely costs more in a year than that $1M increment in BOM costs.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s probably not going to be a kill the company expense.

I design RF/Microwave hardware. The issue is the long term reliability, specifically the semiconductor lifetime drops drastically with temperature, not to mention the passive components. The temp cycling may be more of an issue, as I have seen antenna arrays pull themselves apart during accelerated lifetime testing. I shutdown all of my stuff at 80C.

While you are 100% right, starlink is not marketed for the military.

Starlink, is like Tesla a decade ago. This is their roadster.

Will I get it, yes. Will I complain about early adpotee stuff, yes.

Is my life better just having it along? 1000% yes.

Starlink is marketed to the military, but so far they've been testing it with the antennae they normally use.

SpaceX is literally based in Hawthorne, CA. These dishes are made in a place where it gets stupidly hot.

I get your point, but specifically Hawthorne is a coastal city, so it doesn’t get “stupidly hot”. Average max temp is 85F in August.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne,_California

It's not trivial, of course. But it's also not okay to pretend that you can sell a device for $500 (which in reality costs $2,300), and skimp on the fundamental things that everyone else spends money on to ensure these things don't happen. This could have been fixed. It didn't as a cost cutting measure. I don't know why you were talking about V-Band. SpaceX is not using V-Band. They are mostly using low frequency kaband, and we'll be using high frequency soon. This is exactly the same as all other satellite internet providers out there that have solved this problem. They are not special in disregard. They just chose to ignore it.

Existing phased-array antennas cost, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars.

Getting Starlink Dishy to around $2,000, and I understand it's closer to $1,000 by now, is an incredible engineering achievement. SpaceX didn't accomplish that by overengineering the shit out of it.

I do not doubt that now that this problem has cropped up SpaceX will address it. If they don't, if in a couple of years this is still a problem with the system in full operation, then criticism would be justified.

There is no evidence I've seen showing that it's less than $2000. Please send a link to the source.

> According to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, the company has “made great progress on reducing the cost.” Initially, Each dish would cost SpaceX $3,000 USD to manufacture, Shotwell said they reduced the manufacturing cost to around $1,500 USD.

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/starlink-dish

You mentioned $1000. $1500 is impressive, but is there a follow-up?

I don't see why they don't just leave the antennas in the dish then run waveguide to a box in the shade.

Edit: after looking at a teardown I suppose it's because there are ~3000 channels. Woof.

> No, failing at 122F is not acceptable

I don't think it is a simple as saying that. If, for example, it cost twice as much to design something that works up to 140 as it does to make it work up to 122, I don't think it makes sense to make everyone in the world pay twice as much for something they don't need.

You should sell a more expensive version that works up to 140.

There's a cost to building multiple SKUs. Also you massively overestimate the cost of materials for withstanding such temperatures.

Sure, but I was replying to your general comment that it is simply unacceptable for something not to be engineered to withstand heat above 122.

I think it is a design decision, and the costs and benefits have to be weighed. If the extra cost per unit is more than the lost revenue from not being able to sell to consumers in hight temperature locations, it might make sense not to design it for high temperatures.

As long as these limitations are communicated to potential customers, I don’t see a problem with that.

Do air conditioners need special handling over there? When we got ours serviced the guy told me that in Western Sydney the split systems sometimes shut down on the worst days when you need them due to heat in direct sunlight. You need shade, but even then some had sprinkler/misting systems for the hotter days.

No, they're built with pretty extreme tolerances. Further, they're often placed on rooftops, so it's by design rather than convenience of the materials used.

We're talking about 122F and exposed to direct sunlight for long durations. So more like 150F inside that thing and then with one stroke you are locked out of using any sort of customer electronics parts or packaging. I'm sure SpaceX will look into it but you might not like the outcome.

(And no, most phones will not operate at that temperature for longer than a few minutes)

Maybe they didn't do the math or are planning to improve upon it. But maybe they did do the math and consciously wrote you off.

My iPhone starts panicking whenever it runs maps when the temps go over 100F which considering its 115F today is not a good user experience.

This is literally a record breaking heatwave; https://www.allsides.com/story/western-us-hit-heat-wave-thre...

122F is not a normal temperature.

You're driving what is essentially a greenhouse, I don't want to pay extra for a cooling system that's designed for temperatures up to 150 degrees. Though also I wouldn't pay 6 figures for a car.

> Too many vehicles fail this, and frankly it’s repulsive for something you buy for 5-6 figures.

What's repulsive is the way many people live in AZ.

Literal hot take: maybe people living in one of the hottest places on Earth shouldn't expect to have the same consumer experience (without modulating their habits). IMHO, AZ is chock full of human hubris. Pools, fountains, water features, grass lawns, and golf courses.

Why should people expect to live as if it were Cascadia or New England with water consumption? Same with car performance. Maybe you don't get to have an icy 68°F in your rolling greenhouse behind a 40,000BTU power plant at dead noon in the heckin desert.

To be fair, we’re all environmental parasites no matter where we are on this heckin planet.

I completely agree with you. Though as a Minnesota resident, a 32F low temp operating bound is hilariously ludicrous. "Well below" -20F would be the expectation here. I'm sure Canadians would extend that to well below -40.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for Linus from Linus Tech Tips to show us how to watercool a Starlink dish.

…is it called streaming then?

Per the article, it's already been tested and works. Just throw a sprinkler on the thing.

Clearly, though, the tolerances weren't chosen correctly when they designed the thing. 122F isn't actually that hot for a device designed to sit stationary in the sun all day.

At least they made it white, dishtv's, and others I'm sure, antennas are black.

> Just throw a sprinkler on the thing.

Yeah, that's a brilliant plan for a part of the world that is severely restricted on water usage and is routinely in drought conditions.

Given the size of Phoenix, people don’t give a fuck about their resource use.

I read an article some time back, maybe a link from here, talking about how the up tick in population of AZ/NV were during an unusual wet period which people thought was acceptable and normal. Now, it seems the area is going back to its more natural dry period. Mother Nature's perception of time is very different than human's.

Mount it in a kiddie pool with a pump to reclaim the water. Starlink can sell it as a package deal: dish, pool, pump Extreme Weather package. Complete with puncture repair kit for the pool.

Of course there's still evaporation, so you just station a half dozen condensing dehumidifiers around the pool to capture as much as you can in the immediate area and feed it back into the system.

And there you go: For just a few $thousand in supplemental equipment you get cheap broadband.

Dehumidifiers are really just air conditioners, so at that point you might as well cut out the middle men and air condition the dish directly. An air conditioner will set you back a few hundred dollars, plus power costs.

Sorry, but the voice of my dad yelling, "I'm not paying to air condition the outdoors" haunts this comment!

Building a closed loop cooler isn't exactly rocket science. And, tbh, if I lived in an area where satellite internet was my only practical option, I'm not sure that I'd consider that particularly burdensome.

Despite all the hype, this is still basically a niche product.

Honestly a closed loop solar powered(?) water cooler sounds like the perfect solution.

I wonder why such an aggressive thermal cutoff too, 50C ain't that hot even for consumer-grade electronics. Is it related to all that heat reducing SNR to unacceptable levels? If so, that frankly sounds like a pretty severe design shortcoming.

Yup, the basiv spec for this device intended to be used remotely should be summer in the Saudi desert, or at least Death Valley (in the same US state) - with solar heating also expected.

It's nice that they at least check & shut down to protect the device, but this shouldn't have made it out of the prototypes, nevermind Alpha or Beta testing...

Being in direct sun in the South, I imagine that is pretty easy to hit. Guess there will be a market for air conditioned radomes.

You'd think that after the fiasco of not using automotive grade parts at Tesla which forced them to run AC to keep them within operating range they would have put more thought into high temperature electronics.

The problem is not the outside temperature, but the small difference from the inside one preventing the circuitry inside the dish to cool down. Also the way it is engineered doesn't help: it draws about 100 Watts of power, but the entire circuitry is enclosed in a plastic container with no way to exchange heat with the outside, and the heating parts are kept in "contact" with the metal plate working as heatsink through thermal pads which seem just too thick to me to transfer enough heat. The metal plate should be helped to dissipate all that heat, but that would require flowing air, which is not an option in a closed box. According to a teardown video, there's no way to remove the metal plate without destroying the device, but one can still reach it and that would make possible for example thermal-gluing a metal pipe to it, then build a liquid cooling system by pumping the liquid through a better external heatsink with real fins.

Teardown article with photos and video:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...

100 watts seems like a lot for a receiver. Any idea where all that energy is going? Signal amplification?

It also has to send using a phased array as well.

Oh right duh. Thanks.

I've seen a teardown of one of these things, and it's sealed well to keep out the weather, but that also makes it hard to put in a cooling fan.

When my family moved to Arizona in 1987 we brought along our Pontiac Firebird. My mom loved that car. But it melted in the summer heat. Literally the glue that adhered the the interior materials could not handle the heat and stuff just started falling down. Goop flowing down the walls and windows.

I have a starlink beta, and we're currenty experiencing a really bad hearwave here in germany ( I measured 35C in the shade ).

Mine works like a charm regardless.

That's not a heatwave by US standards, that's a pretty common summer day for a decent chunk of the US. Arizona can get to around 50C.

I think you know that heat waves are defined relative to the local climate. And recall that all but the southern part of Germany is north of the US-Canada border. AZ should be considered uninhabitable (in a sustainable sense) even outside of heat waves.

A reasonably modern air conditioner to cool your house in Phoenix a few months in the summer is more efficient than many of the common ways you'd heat a house from potentially well below freezing in the winter in many other places.

And much of our power comes from solar (which is maximally available at the time cooling is maximally needed) and nuclear, while serious heating is often literally burning fossil fuels in your basement.

I actually believe that the opposite is true. It takes much more energy to cool off a home with AC than it does to heat a home in cold weather.

No it doesn't. An AC essentially transfers more heat energy out than electricity it consumes. Most heating generates exactly as much heat as energy consumed (electric heaters, burning fuels, etc.). Heat pumps are an exception but they don't work well before freezing temperatures.

Yeah the defrost cycle limits the heat pumps heating ability, but AC units have a similar limit wrt how much they are able to lower the temperature of the air. AFIAK they can do about 20 F. At this point you need to do some math and add additional units and run them 24/7 nullifying this benefit.

Geothermal heat pumps and good insulation solve both.

Typical energy efficiency of heating is comparable to AC. The baseline solution is using waste heat from electricity generation and industrial processes. Geothermal heat pumps have become popular in the past decade or two, and lake/seawater heat pumps are seen as the future of district heating systems in dense cities.

The big difference is insulation. On the average, houses that need heating are better insulated than houses that need air conditioning.

I think you are confusing the efficiency of heating sources vs the inefficiency of A/C. However A/C just moves heat, it doesn't have to create it. This is why in climates in which they are appropriate heat pumps can be even more efficient than other forms of heating.

I will say there likely isn't a ton of good hard data on this for another reason, and that is that humidity plays a role, both in what temperatures are comfortable and maybe in some forms of temperature management.

Huh? That hard data was half of my undergrad courses in mech

The work put into the compressor and fan motors has to be rejected along with the heat that is transported by the refrigerant.

It is counterintuitive but A/C in general has a much smaller footprint than heating.

And where does your water come from?

Yes, if I want to be locked inside 24/7 it turns out it does not matter much specifically where I do that.

What does it take to spend a vacation day outside working in your garden? At 30F that's just a thick jacket away, what kinda clothing can make your body work at 120F and sun?

I agree that your solar-powered cooling is a giant improvement. But the water situation still seems totally unsustainable.

German hearwaves sound cool though.

Sounds like something pioneered by Kraftwerk

122 F seems to be 50 °C. Are those things designed for space or for home office ?

Neither. They are designed to sit outdoors with a clear view of the sky (and the sun I guess).

+100F in Sun isn't at all uncommon during a hot summer in the upper Midwest if the object is dark. Air temperatures of over 100 are a semi-annual occurrence, typically around August, so a dark object (such as a roof or blacktop) pushing 120 wouldn't be a surprise at all. Still not as bad as AZ, but it's not that much different.

We aren't even close to a desert or space either- forests, plains, lakes and rivers abound.

It was 102° F in St. Louis today. Not hard to imagine 20° hotter on some roofs.

122+ F ambient on concrete.. it's going to be much hotter than that.

Weird to see a ZeroHedge article a) on Hacker News and b) even talking about StarLink at all

They should ask Ubiquiti how to handle this. Their Unifi range of products don't start doing anything unless they're at least at 65°C

They should probably sell white painted versions for warmer climates.

The enclosure is made of some kind of white plastic. But the consumer units also consume ~100W evenly spread out just below the flat plastic surface. So many (expensive) chips needed to do that phased array antenna thing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-terminal-cos...

SpaceX signed an agreement a few years ago with Swiss manufacturer STMicroelectronics to build the terminals, a person with knowledge of the deal told Insider in December. They added that SpaceX may be paying $2.4 billion to produce 1 million Starlink terminals.

At least it will melt any snow/ice during winter time in northern climates.

Comment: ST is primarily French-Italian, with a HQ in Switzerland. I wouldn't call it Swiss.

I don't know anything about the engineering of those dishes but why do they need to put electronics in them and can't move it at the other end of the cable, inside the house?

Didn't knock my unit off in 110° heat Red bluff California.

Hello from 15 minutes to the south in Corning.

Maybe those that are exhibiting problems were sold to people that the engineers didn’t design for. Sales people don’t tend to care who they sell to $ometimes.

As an aside to this…..I worked for a switch vendor. We where asked by the DoD to provide commands to disable heat, etc. related shutdowns. ‘Nuf said.

This can't be a new problem, how do companies like Direct TV handle this? More robust equipment?

Receive-only dishes are usually just a curved piece of metal with a fairly dumb LNB mounted on an arm. The Starlink "dish" isn't a traditional parabolic reflector, it is a phased array antenna with electronics under the surface.

How does a starlink internet connection perform in a light storm?

The dish looks a bit delicate.

I'd try attaching a tiny tarp to the dish itself

I have a Starlink, but I also live in Michigan, so it probably won't get exposed to temps like that. Guess I dodged a bullet?

The sun is hot

Not really, it’s surface temperature is about 5800K, which is just middling for a star. Surface temperatures of blue supergiants can reach 50,000K.

DITBA

It should work at an extension of military temperature ranges for global use indoors, outdoors, and in odd semi-indoor scenarios like the back of a hot truck: -75 to +125 C / -103 F to 257 F.

Treating it as retail consumer electronics shit isn't rugged enough for real use.

Speaking of which, how could mobile phones be made to work in extremely hot temperatures for emergencies without shutting down?

It’s really just comes down to thermal mass vs. power dissipation. Either you have to increase the thermal mass, or limit the power. 99.99..% of use cases are for the phone to be in your pocket inside, so designing in a larger thermal mass, or limiting performance isn’t going to be a factor that drives design.

However, since most phones are relative water resistant now, a good option is to use evaporative effects to cool them down. You could also dig a hole in the earth to find cooler temps and dissipate heat that way.

I think the earth approach is a good option, even if one has to dig a few feet down to find some cooler ground in the middle of nowhere.

Mostly just by using better components and beter internal cooling (=thicker design).

You can find same chips (=same function) made for consumer electronics, automative, aeronautic and military, all with different temperature and humidity ranges. I'm not sure about mobile phone CPUs/SoCs, but automotive equipment is a lot more resilient to voltage spikes well above the normal 12-14V.

Aerospace / military spec'd components would probably be the best way to go where possible. If it's a lithium ion battery issue, then maybe they should be using a different battery chemistry.

Well you don't leave them out to bake all day, usually.

I left my Palm Pilot on the dashboard of my car one day, and the LCD melted.

Fortunately, I had seen this before in undergraduate physics lab, the day our LCD experiment was interrupted by the room thermostat breaking, sending the temp > 100F. The nice thing about LCDs is that the crystals reform when it cools. All you have to do is wait. Probably works for most modern phone displays.

Even commercial-grade electronics have a higher temp range than this. Commercial is typically 0C-70C. It’s insane that thermal shutdown is at 122F, considering it is specifically designed to be outside. You could get away with that if it’s a device that would never leave your desk, but not for this application.

Either this was a dumb oversight, or it was an intentionally cut corner because of schedule or MVP or something.

Treating it as retail consumer electronics shit isn't rugged enough for real use.

But it is retail consumer electronics and it should be able to handle temperatures commonly encountered for a retail electronics satellite dish, which includes a hot roof in Arizona, but does not include the back of a hot truck where a consumer shouldn't expect his home dish to operate.

If they make the dishes fully mobile as promised, the hot truck is a reasonable situation to expect and design for.

Wouldn't that go on top of the truck, rather than in the truck?

What? No it shouldn't. Retail consumers want to be able to afford this thing and their use case is plenty "real". It can't cost $10,000+ per unit. Maybe in the future they can create an industrial/military grade unit but that's clearly not required for the mass market product.

122F... lol.... I guess they forgot that we have a sun?

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/06/16/16/44302655-9692943-...

I like it.

Fit them with fans to keep them cool. Simples.

All the comments on the article are really extremist. So I looked up Zerohedge and found it 'is a far-right libertarian financial blog' and 'is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis' .. so I guess that makes sense.

Not sure why anyone would be bearish of a beta product that is only just scratching the surface of its potential.

It may be a libertarian rag, but the article is just about what it says on the title: thermal shutdown hitting Starlink users.

In fact, I had tried to submit an article coming from Ars Technica [0] but I deleted it as I saw it gaining no traction and I noticed this one had a sizable amount of upvotes and comments already.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...

Appears source was changed to yours

Hope the fix for this will be Elon tackling climate change :)

So apparently one of the downsides of Starlink is that the base station is an energy pig. Doesn't surprise me all that much in retrospect but I didn't think of it when I first heard about it.

How much energy does it use?

110W peak usage.

I've seen wifi hotspots use this much and they don't have to connect to space.

Is this really "energy pig" level of usage for space based communications? My former experience was with gimbled / gyro pointing dishes which were very energy intensive by comparison. 100W and little physical movement would have been considered very efficiant.

How do other space com platforms handle deployment / install of end user terminals. I've not seen ones with the spaceX approach (simple end user install). Perhaps the professional installs get the energy use down to 10W or whatever is not considered "energy pig" usage.

As a point of reference, tesla's cars hit energy draws of 900,000W when driving. Their semi is likely to use even more. So I think worth being careful about energy pig label.

No wifi hotspot is using 110 watts.

110 watts is a fair amount of power - at $0.20/kWh you're going to add $16 to your power bill monthly.

It's similar to leaving a desktop computer on 24/7.

My Netgear R8500 was 50 watts easily I'd say. My friends gaming computer DEFINATELY uses more than 100W. Basic computer use for cryptomining seems to use a lot more as well. It just doesn't seem like 100W for what this thing does is a ton.

> Under load, the Netgear R8500 uses 21.5 Watts of power making it the most consumptive router we have tested [1]

Of course a gaming computer uses more than 100w. Of course a crypto rig uses more than 100w. And that's not "basic computer use", it's the most power-hungry computer use.

Meanwhile, my UniFi UAP-AC-Pro APs are powered via PoE and are using <4w.

1: https://www.legitreviews.com/netgear-nighthawk-x8-r8500-ac53...

More like 50 watts max, and 20 watts under normal load. The power supply can't even provide more than 60W. And gaming computers are more like 2-5W suspended, 20-50W idle/browsing, 200-500W gaming.

Exactly.

https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R8500/R8500_UM_4...

The power supply for an R8500 gives 19V / 3.16 A DC maximum.

And yes, a gaming PC can use a few hundred watts---that's why it has to have all of the thermal management and all of the hot air blowing out of it.

P.s. https://kb.netgear.com/23003/Maximum-power-consumption-for-N...

I'm curious about the browsing figures. As someone that used a Surface Pro 3 for browsing, js or flash pegged it. I'm curious on a i7 desktop what the real average is for my browsing habits, and I'm going to have to test this. bah.

According to international standards, your wifi antennas should have a maximum of 0.1/0.2W power (up to 4W for some specific 5Ghz frequencies). Wifi router hardware is really basic, you need something as powerful as a computer from the late 90s... which on todays hardware runs on a few watts. Something like a rpi is really beefy for a home router.

So 100W may not be a big deal if you have an abundance of electricity around. But on the order of energy you can produce yourself, it's quite a lot.

Hughes Gen5 HT2000W .98m 1-watt Satellite Internet System (https://ispsat.com/product/hughesnet-gen5-ht2000w-98m-1-watt...) has a 73W power supply. Normal use seems to be about 40W (https://community.hughesnet.com/t5/Products-and-Plans/Gen5-H...).

900,000W? Wow, that's about 1200HP.

Typical satellite internet uses about 30W.

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