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Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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