Hacker News Reader

Comment by babesh | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com