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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

Parting Shot: "To all beta testers using Starlink this summer, better come up with a dish heat management system or else face no connectivity. Not surprising, considering this is a company owned by Elon Musk."

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"all beta testers" is a bit broad. I live in Michigan, and our highest recorded temperature is still 10 degrees lower than the point at which the dish would shut off. Maybe certain users should pay attention, but most beta testers were in northern latitudes to boot, so it's a little more nuanced than that.

That's air temperature. 35°C can easily be enough to hit 50°C inside when the sun burns down on it all day.

Last week we had a heat wave that hit 37C, we had internet the entire time. Just my anecdata, but I have yet to see a thermal shutdown.

Sure, if you expect your satellite to be in the shade and not sitting on a rooftop which easily hits 140F+ multiple times per year in Michigan.

Well it is a beta test after all. This is when the design gets a real life shakedown.

It's a bit weird though to not test these at different temperatures beforehand, given that's probably pretty easy to do. Maybe it's more like an alpha test than a beta in practice.

You would think that people working in software would understand the idea that your assumptions about the environment your product is in are very often invalidated during real world testing, but this thread doesn't seem to bear that out. Perhaps the mountain of abstractions, automated retries, fault tolerance, and error correction that makes technology as reliable as it is, has made us complacently unaware of just how hard it is to build something new.

With how often large swaths of the internet are down or having issues I don't think most people in software have anything more than a cursory understanding of some of the terms you have in there, hard to be complacent about reliability when a lot of software is equally held together by tape and gum.

Forget beta. Apple's production iPhones go into thermal shutdown several times a year for me where I live. Most recently, yesterday.

You can tell it's getting close because the screen will dim.

The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of the planet doesn't have the same weather as San Francisco.

> The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of the planet doesn't have the same weather as San Francisco.

Two things: first, Apple is headquartered in Cupertino, which gets quite a bit warmer than San Francisco. Second, I've seen phones overheat and shut down in the summer in SF. This isn't a bubble thing; this is a company prioritizing miniaturization over proper functioning. Form over function.

To be fair, designing such a small thing with cooling for this kind of temperature is really hard. You'd actually need active cooling, because otherwise you'd be too susceptible to colder temperatures, and even then the sun would quickly bleach out all components - assuming you'd even see something on the screen to begin with. Not designing your phone to run under the direct sun is IMO a reasonable trade-off.

Its really apple protecting its users from low temperature devices.

People buy iPhones because they know apple knows cold devices are bad

Yup, it's always incredible to see how myopic tge tech bubble is - starting with software that couldn't handle East Coast US 5-digit ZIP (postal) codes that begin with "0". Google Maps never shows the highway exit # until you're nearly there, but that's all we use on the East Coast, since there are many old roads that run parallel to the highways for many miles, so telling me to "get off at Rt110" is hopelessly ambiguous with a dozen exits for that road. I could go on...

I have the opposite issue; Google will tell me the exit number on highways that don't have exit numbers posted.

Same. I want it to tell me "take Rengstorff Ave exit" and it just tells me "take exit 53b." I have no idea what 53b is and the big signs don't say it either.

Look for the highway mile markers - the exit number is based on them. Should get you closer at least.

Not all highways work like this. Take I-87 in New York for example. Thankfully most of those roads are slowly changing exit numbers so they follow the sane convention you describe!

Does google maps still not know where subway entrances are?

I agree with you in general, but despite my not being a rocket scientist, i know for sure 50°C is not an OK limit for outdoor stuff on many parts of the planet. It's like Outdoors Electronics 101 so not exactly something to test for in a beta.

Bananaware. Reaches customer's premises in an unusable state.

For a product intended to be used by people in remote locations, temperature range is an alpha test feature, not a beta test feature, because there's a very good chance they will need to completely redesign the dish internals to operate at higher temperature ranges, especially if they expect to weatherproof the dishes in future designs.

the design process is different for hardware because you can't just fix everything with a patch after-the-fact. You have to actually anticipate problems and account for them in your design, especially when you are charging people money for the product and marketing it as a remote solution.

A line like this (and Reddit sources) makes me question the authenticity of this story.

The Ars Technica version of this story [1] has more detail. The tl;dr is that Starlink dishes have an upper limit of 50°C and a lower limit of -30°C. While these limits are fine for consumer electronics used indoors, they're obviously inappropriate for outdoor electronics.

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

> they're obviously inappropriate

They're unfortunately constraints, but for 95% of people they're workable constraints. If there are difficult problems with bumping these limits (I have no clue), it could just become part of the market definition.

Only if you're counting people who live in San Francisco and other similarly temperate climates.

I live in Minnesota. Last week, the high temperature, in the shade, was about 40°C. A device in the sun would easily see its temperature exceed 50°C. In the winter, overnight lows can go to -40°C. An outdoor device with thermal limits of -30°C to +50°C is not fit for purpose in many parts of the Midwest.

I'm in Toronto incidentally, not sf.

I suspect overnight lows of -40 are ok, because it sounds like it's -30 after the self heating.

There are definitely reports of people having it work through 40 degree heat waves, but I suspect that's close to the limit. Keep in mind it is white, so the sun isn't as bad as it could be.

I don't have stats to back this up, but I think it's the case that most people live in reasonably temperate climates, 50 degrees is really frickin hot (dangerously so), -30 degrees is really frickin cold (dangerously so).

Agreed that 50°C is really hot, but you have to remember that 50°C includes the ambient heat plus the heat generated by the circuitry. My cable modem gets noticeably warm (and I can hear its internal fan spin up) when I download a large file that saturates my connection for a while. I could easily see the internal circuitry of the Starlink dish going over 50°C under load even when external temperature is 40°C.

From what I'm reading, it looks like the dish is passively cooled, which I find surprising. I would have expected at least a small cooling fan or something to provide a bit of airflow for convective cooling.

Large tracts of the US have a continental climate, where temperature excursions are common. Remember that Starlink is marketed at people living in the flat countryside.

For something that's likely to be mounted on a roof, and is outputting around 100 watts of its own heat, the range where problems happen gets a lot bigger.

95% of which group of people?

Otherwise potential starlink customers.

Like most stats, it is made up.

I mean, it is Zero Hedge.

FWIW, I have Starlink and I'm in Pahrump, NV. We hit 111F today and my dishy is in direct sunlight so easily was over 122F on surfaces. Didn't go into thermal shutdown, no disruptions in service, and I didn't have to water it either.

What do you do in Pahrump, NV!? Such a remote place!

I’m cybersecurity CTO for a fortune 100 company. I told them I was getting out of the bay area and they were fine with it!

It's about a 1hr drive from Vegas but cheaper land.

Zerohedge is severely anti-Elon Biased. He might be at fault for many things, but this is just a first gen product that hopefully improves in the next generations.

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