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Comment by ganoushoreilly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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