Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 516 posts

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

#141

Post by kaesar14 »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #105
MattGaiser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

122F is 50C. How much of the world actually gets that hot? AZ is currently the hottest place in the world at the moment. Not the upper range. The hottest place. https://www.wx-now.com/Weather/WxExtremes?hottest=true

Where I live in Florida, roofs routinely get hotter than that. Listed temps measure air temp, in a ventilated box 5 feet above grass. This is nothing like being on a roof in Summer here. We aren't a desert and we have tens of millions of people. This isn't going to work. An aside, I was dating a woman from The North. She came here and we were travelling around the State. We stopped in Venice at a restaurant, I wasn't…

This would be absolutely wild to do in “the North” during summer as well.

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

#142

Post by Sebb767 »

smoldesu wrote: post #139
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #8

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."

"all beta testers" is a bit broad. I live in Michigan, and our highest recorded temperature is still 10 degrees lower than the point at which the dish would shut off. Maybe certain users should pay attention, but most beta testers were in northern latitudes to boot, so it's a little more nuanced than that.

That's air temperature. 35°C can easily be enough to hit 50°C inside when the sun burns down on it all day.

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

#143

Post by Grimm1 »

infogulch wrote: post #101
dividedbyzero wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit weird though to not test these at different temperatures beforehand, given that's probably pretty easy to do. Maybe it's more like an alpha test than a beta in practice.

You would think that people working in software would understand the idea that your assumptions about the environment your product is in are very often invalidated during real world testing, but this thread doesn't seem to bear that out. Perhaps the mountain of abstractions, automated retries, fault tolerance, and error correction that makes technology as reliable as it is, has made us complacently unaware of just ho…

With how often large swaths of the internet are down or having issues I don't think most people in software have anything more than a cursory understanding of some of the terms you have in there, hard to be complacent about reliability when a lot of software is equally held together by tape and gum.

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

#144

Post by tombot »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #105
MattGaiser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

122F is 50C. How much of the world actually gets that hot? AZ is currently the hottest place in the world at the moment. Not the upper range. The hottest place. https://www.wx-now.com/Weather/WxExtremes?hottest=true

Where I live in Florida, roofs routinely get hotter than that. Listed temps measure air temp, in a ventilated box 5 feet above grass. This is nothing like being on a roof in Summer here. We aren't a desert and we have tens of millions of people. This isn't going to work. An aside, I was dating a woman from The North. She came here and we were travelling around the State. We stopped in Venice at a restaurant, I wasn't…

You are living in a city affected by global warming

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

#145

Post by murgindrag »

nickysielicki wrote: post #128
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #6

I’m always surprised how poor engineering gets exposed in products I purchase being an Arizona resident. No, failing at 122F is not acceptable. If your hardware is exposed to outside conditions, it should operate easily below 32F, and well above 140F. Considering that phones can operate below 0F and near 122F, that’s embarrassingly bad. Same thing in vehicles. If you’re driving consistently at interstate speeds, you…

It's not trivial to do things at tens of gigahertz at a wide range of temperatures. They didn't engineer it this way because they didn't consider the existence of Arizona, Texas, and Southern California. The thermal limits exist because RF is absurdly difficult. Maybe in 30 years we'll have TCXOs and other RFICs that make it trivial. Right now it's not. tl;dr: Your phone doesn't have radios capable of talking on band…

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.

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

#146

Post by 8note »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #110
jayd16 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also live in the fifth most populous city in the United States. So, yeah, it is. But that's still less than half a percent of the US population.

I guess we should also avoid rust proofing metals since most people don't live by the ocean, too.

You need rustproofing wherever you put salt on the roads in winter, too

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

#147

Post by andrewmcwatters »

adamcstephens wrote: post #126
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand comments like this. 7 million people didn't decide to move here this year . Conditions in Arizona have dramatically changed over the lifetime of the state. It doesn't make sense to live where you can freeze to death or don't have access to water, either, does it? Except those two scenarios include most Americans . Without modern infrastructure, it hardly makes sense to live anywhere.

Obviously 7 million people didn’t move there over the course of this year. If that’s what you thought I was getting at, I’m not surprised you were confused. Conditions have changed, but are people reconsidering their own decisions?

People don't decide where they want to be born.

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

#148

Post by nixgeek »

murgindrag wrote: post #145
nickysielicki wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not trivial to do things at tens of gigahertz at a wide range of temperatures. They didn't engineer it this way because they didn't consider the existence of Arizona, Texas, and Southern California. The thermal limits exist because RF is absurdly difficult. Maybe in 30 years we'll have TCXOs and other RFICs that make it trivial. Right now it's not. tl;dr: Your phone doesn't have radios capable of talking on band…

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 li…

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.

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

#149

Post by Sebb767 »

kelnos wrote: post #55
reaperducer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget beta. Apple's production iPhones go into thermal shutdown several times a year for me where I live. Most recently, yesterday. You can tell it's getting close because the screen will dim. The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of the planet doesn't have the same weather as San Francisco.

> The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of the planet doesn't have the same weather as San Francisco. Two things: first, Apple is headquartered in Cupertino, which gets quite a bit warmer than San Francisco. Second, I've seen phones overheat and shut down in the summer in SF. This isn't a bubble thing; this is a company prioritizing miniaturization over proper functioning. Form over function.

To be fair, designing such a small thing with cooling for this kind of temperature is really hard. You'd actually need active cooling, because otherwise you'd be too susceptible to colder temperatures, and even then the sun would quickly bleach out all components - assuming you'd even see something on the screen to begin with. Not designing your phone to run under the direct sun is IMO a reasonable trade-off.
Post reply on HN