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Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 516 posts

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#31

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."

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.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#32

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."

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

I mean, it is Zero Hedge.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#34

They should probably sell white painted versions for warmer climates.

The enclosure is made of some kind of white plastic. But the consumer units also consume ~100W evenly spread out just below the flat plastic surface. So many (expensive) chips needed to do that phased array antenna thing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-terminal-cos...

SpaceX signed an agreement a few years ago with Swiss manufacturer STMicroelectronics to build the terminals, a person with knowledge of the deal told Insider in December. They added that SpaceX may be paying $2.4 billion to produce 1 million Starlink terminals.

At least it will melt any snow/ice during winter time in northern climates.

Comment: ST is primarily French-Italian, with a HQ in Switzerland. I wouldn't call it Swiss.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wifi hotspot is using 110 watts. 110 watts is a fair amount of power - at $0.20/kWh you're going to add $16 to your power bill monthly. It's similar to leaving a desktop computer on 24/7.

My Netgear R8500 was 50 watts easily I'd say. My friends gaming computer DEFINATELY uses more than 100W. Basic computer use for cryptomining seems to use a lot more as well. It just doesn't seem like 100W for what this thing does is a ton.

> Under load, the Netgear R8500 uses 21.5 Watts of power making it the most consumptive router we have tested [1]

Of course a gaming computer uses more than 100w. Of course a crypto rig uses more than 100w. And that's not "basic computer use", it's the most power-hungry computer use.

Meanwhile, my UniFi UAP-AC-Pro APs are powered via PoE and are using 1: https://www.legitreviews.com/netgear-nighthawk-x8-r8500-ac53...

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#36
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wifi hotspot is using 110 watts. 110 watts is a fair amount of power - at $0.20/kWh you're going to add $16 to your power bill monthly. It's similar to leaving a desktop computer on 24/7.

My Netgear R8500 was 50 watts easily I'd say. My friends gaming computer DEFINATELY uses more than 100W. Basic computer use for cryptomining seems to use a lot more as well. It just doesn't seem like 100W for what this thing does is a ton.

More like 50 watts max, and 20 watts under normal load. The power supply can't even provide more than 60W. And gaming computers are more like 2-5W suspended, 20-50W idle/browsing, 200-500W gaming.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#37
post #11

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for Linus from Linus Tech Tips to show us how to watercool a Starlink dish.

Per the article, it's already been tested and works. Just throw a sprinkler on the thing. Clearly, though, the tolerances weren't chosen correctly when they designed the thing. 122F isn't actually that hot for a device designed to sit stationary in the sun all day.

At least they made it white, dishtv's, and others I'm sure, antennas are black.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#38

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."

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...

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#40
post #18

All the comments on the article are really extremist. So I looked up Zerohedge and found it 'is a far-right libertarian financial blog' and 'is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis' .. so I guess that makes sense. Not sure why anyone would be bearish of a beta product that is only just scratching the surface of its potential.

It may be a libertarian rag, but the article is just about what it says on the title: thermal shutdown hitting Starlink users.

In fact, I had tried to submit an article coming from Ars Technica [0] but I deleted it as I saw it gaining no traction and I noticed this one had a sizable amount of upvotes and comments already.

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

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