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Comment by shaklee3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In the shade.

The critical components are in the shade of the dish.

Fahrenheit not Celcius

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.

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.

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