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

151–160 of 516 posts

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

#151

Post by cartoonworld »

adamcstephens wrote: post #127
cartoonworld wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. The whole point of Starlink is that it's suitable for places where there is poor existing infrastructure. The desert tops the list! They also have service area restrictions for sign up. Just say Tesla dropped the ball on this engineering prototype and V2 will work on the sun.

To be clear, I hope Tesla fails in everything they do. That wasn’t really the point I was making though.

I guess you hate Phoenix? Alice cooper, the Meat Puppets, stunning desert vistas?

People should almost certainly get over grass lawns, I know there is going to be huge problems with water, but afiact Phoenix recycles a huge proportion of their greywater, and this is a perfect use case for solar, molten salt, nuclear.

Hard to farm, I guess. Isn't there gold to mine too?

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

#152

Post by oivey »

tombot wrote: post #144
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Everyone is.

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

#153

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

goodcanadian wrote: post #113
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…

As a Canadian, 32F seems like an oddly high lower limit to me. Things should operate down to at least -40.

Assuming you can keep something in the shade - does anywhere on Earth get to 140F beside inside forest fires, lightning bolts and volcanoes?

There is a substantial portion of the worlds population that lives months at a time where temperatures are regularly well below freezing.

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

#155

Post by ls612 »

1MachineElf wrote: post #75
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…

Interesting. What phone operates at 0F? A few years ago I was in 15F conditions, the batteries in both my phone and my hiking partner's phone would not work at all. Going out briefly in 0F weather and pulling the phone out of the pocket of a warm jacket might be fine, but I'm doubtful a phone could continue to function when thoroughly cooled to 0F. If there's been a recent shift in phone technology, then I'd like to…

Every iPhone I've had has worked fine outside in Minnesota winters. The phone uses energy to function and so probably is hotter than the surrounding air.

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

#156

Post by cortesoft »

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…

> No, failing at 122F is not acceptable

I don't think it is a simple as saying that. If, for example, it cost twice as much to design something that works up to 140 as it does to make it work up to 122, I don't think it makes sense to make everyone in the world pay twice as much for something they don't need.

You should sell a more expensive version that works up to 140.

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

#157

Post by jltsiren »

marcinzm wrote: post #107
bart_spoon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually believe that the opposite is true. It takes much more energy to cool off a home with AC than it does to heat a home in cold weather.

No it doesn't. An AC essentially transfers more heat energy out than electricity it consumes. Most heating generates exactly as much heat as energy consumed (electric heaters, burning fuels, etc.). Heat pumps are an exception but they don't work well before freezing temperatures.

Typical energy efficiency of heating is comparable to AC. The baseline solution is using waste heat from electricity generation and industrial processes. Geothermal heat pumps have become popular in the past decade or two, and lake/seawater heat pumps are seen as the future of district heating systems in dense cities.

The big difference is insulation. On the average, houses that need heating are better insulated than houses that need air conditioning.

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

#158

Post by bombcar »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #74
kelnos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite issue; Google will tell me the exit number on highways that don't have exit numbers posted.

Same. I want it to tell me "take Rengstorff Ave exit" and it just tells me "take exit 53b." I have no idea what 53b is and the big signs don't say it either.

Look for the highway mile markers - the exit number is based on them. Should get you closer at least.

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

#159

Post by brianwawok »

user3939382 wrote: post #134
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

Palm Springs CA gets that hot, especially inside a vehicle.

You don’t put a star link inside a vehicle

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

#160

Post by nickysielicki »

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…

The military is not a business with business constraints. If cost and power draw is no concern, then sure, it's possible. Hell, put a little AC unit beside the enclosure.

These are CPEs and they're sold at a tremendous loss already (a quick google says a whopping $2500 loss on a $500 price tag!). They won't stay in business long if they burn an extra $500 per device to make it suitable for a couple thousand extra customers.

Post reply on HN