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

arstechnica.com

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

#371

Post by coolspot »

foobiekr wrote: post #68
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #29

Sort of funny that the solution for streaming is to literally turn on a stream of water. On a separate note, even if you don’t live in Arizona, a litmus test for good engineering is whether or not you see reviews of a product melting in Arizona. Yeah, melt. Literally. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US. If it doesn’t work here, it’s not mass market.

Networking vendors who know what they're doing literally put gear into ovens for extended periods as part of the DVT phase of testing, and put outdoor gear like cellular antennas/ptp wireless/ptp optical into stress environments prior to manufacturing. This again seems like the typical Musk venture, like the Tesla non-automative screens, where they didn't seemingly talk to anyone in the industry.

Yep, can confirm: when Jensen Huang presented new RTX 30xx series, he literally pulled 3090 from the oven.

https://youtu.be/q8ow_M5Hl2Q

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

#372

Post by shaklee3 »

stagger87 wrote: post #194
new_realist wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This flaw was known to SpaceX before the beta began; SpaceX has publicly said the dishes are only certified to 104° Fahrenheit. Musk prefers to ship known broken products in the name of velocity, and out of a sociopathic contempt for the consumer. It’s happened to me more than once.

Is it even fair to call it a 'flaw' or 'broken' if they advertise the limitations? Almost all electronics will have some operational temperature range depending on power consumed and cooling available. Is there even active cooling on the unit?

It's a flaw because they are required to provide service in areas that hit these temperatures with certain SLAs. I say required because they want a government contract promising that they can do it.

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

#373

Post by MobiusHorizons »

XorNot wrote: post #341
da_chicken wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones. Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems. Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found ou…

This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have problems, but given the use case it's not really going to be that bad". Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous. The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscr…

People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail.

the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.

A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...

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

#374

Post by shaklee3 »

drusepth wrote: post #315
falcolas wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, products are frequently created to not shut down in “average” summer temperatures. It’s a well known operating parameter throughout the US - temperatures break 105°F even up in Canada. It’s not even the hottest part of the summer yet. I can’t imagine this problem getting better.

On the other hand, products do frequently shut down in "average" temperatures, especially in the context of internet dishes. The rural communities most likely to use Starlink are also those most likely to be relying on satellite dishes right now, which seem to frequently suffer from similar problems. My parents pay for internet from both HughesNet and AT&T because the former stops working whenever it snows more than…

No. I said this earlier, but they won a rural auction from the FCC where they were given 900 million dollars for Starlink, which includes providing coverage in areas well above 100 degrees f on a regular basis. They are required to provide this. If they hadn't won the auction, they can do whatever they want. The auction had service level agreements that could not be met with this limitation. It's a fundamental flaw that has to be fixed.

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

#375

Post by awesomeusername »

shaklee3 wrote: post #366
blhack wrote: post #154

Starlink is in beta. The entire purpose of the beta is to find stuff like this. They found something, and I'm sure that the next iteration of this before it goes to mass market will account for it. You're just seeing the system work.

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 gove…

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

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

#376

Post by shaklee3 »

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 trivial, of course. But it's also not okay to pretend that you can sell a device for $500 (which in reality costs $2,300), and skimp on the fundamental things that everyone else spends money on to ensure these things don't happen. This could have been fixed. It didn't as a cost cutting measure. I don't know why you were talking about V-Band. SpaceX is not using V-Band. They are mostly using low frequency kaband, and we'll be using high frequency soon. This is exactly the same as all other satellite internet providers out there that have solved this problem. They are not special in disregard. They just chose to ignore it.

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

#377

Post by coolspot »

huslage wrote: post #250
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…

SpaceX is literally based in Hawthorne, CA. These dishes are made in a place where it gets stupidly hot.

I get your point, but specifically Hawthorne is a coastal city, so it doesn’t get “stupidly hot”. Average max temp is 85F in August.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne,_California

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

#378

Post by rpmisms »

nine_k wrote: post #334
tyingq wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separate companies with the same CEO, (some) shared board members, joint projects, cross sales of services and equipment, loans of employees, etc. Surely there's significant culture bleed.

I wish more of the SpaceX culture bled into Tesla then.

Move faster, break more things? Tesla delivers far more refined products than SpaceX

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

#379

Post by nitrogen »

nine_k wrote: post #337
froh wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont get the °C vs F one? with 122C youre covered for 122F. 122C = 251.6F and 122F = 50C

The device detects overheating and shuts down orderly. If they planned to shut it down at 122C (which is indeed close to melting the solder) but by mistake made it shut down at 122F (not that much for most electronics), it would be a completely understandable blooper. It doesn't mean that the hardware isn't capable of operating at 122F.

122F is exactly 50C, so it's probably just a nice round number that was chosen for the shutdown temperature.

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

#380

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

birdyrooster wrote: post #326
devit wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also add a heater.

Which is what Google does in at least one of its data centers.

Is that for condensation control or because you're hitting the low end of your temp range?
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