As an aside to this…..I worked for a switch vendor. We where asked by the DoD to provide commands to disable heat, etc. related shutdowns. ‘Nuf said.
Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
381–390 of 516 posts
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much energy does it use?
110W peak usage. I've seen wifi hotspots use this much and they don't have to connect to space. Is this really "energy pig" level of usage for space based communications? My former experience was with gimbled / gyro pointing dishes which were very energy intensive by comparison. 100W and little physical movement would have been considered very efficiant. How do other space com platforms handle deployment / install of…
Typical satellite internet uses about 30W.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#383I’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…
I completely agree with you. Though as a Minnesota resident, a 32F low temp operating bound is hilariously ludicrous. "Well below" -20F would be the expectation here. I'm sure Canadians would extend that to well below -40.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spain, or the deserts of Africa, California, Chile, or the southwestern US, as well as a good chunk of the middle east? What about anywhere along the equator?
I guess you could consider border states of Mexico as the same geographical region as the southwestern US, but those too. Anecdotal, but I've seen routine thermal throttling on macs in a border state with outdoor temperatures of 45, ambient indoor temperatures of 30-33, so you basically need either AC or some other external cooling system to manage more performance than a web browser and office apps.
I have heard anecdotal stories of the adhesive on rear-view mirrors of cars literally melting in the Phoenix sun (which can hit 120 F / 49 C or worse). So your story is not surprising at all, sadly
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#385I’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…
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
+55-56C is about is the hottest AIR temp you'll get globally. Pretty common to see telecomm gear that falls in line with this max temp. The +55C does not include heat from direct sunlight/insolation. Unless rated for much higher temps, you'll need a sun shade for your gear out in the field. Problem with Starlink is that with a sun shade you'd most likely lose line of sight to the sats or attenuate the signal badly.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
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.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#387Starlink 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.
It’s like when Tesla finally realized their imaging cameras weren’t worth crap during the winter with road crust all over them. Proving the moderately-self driving capabilities moot.
Ideal conditions during development may not replicate real-world use.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the whole "agile" vs traditional/waterfall mentality, scooters before motorcars, etc., put into practice. Hardware is hard . > It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available Fun fact: they don't make (commercially available) GPUs, NICs, pretty much any PC components rated below 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either…
Along the same lines, most hardware is designed under the assumption that you aren't significantly above sea level. Tons of medium-high voltage electronics have trouble with arcing once it turns on at 6000+ ft.
arcing involves ionizing air, right? I would have expected that the breakdown voltage of air increases with altitude, due to decreasing density of air.
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#389Earlier 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 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 kab…
[deleted]
Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
#390Starlink 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.
If your engineering team had to wait for a product failure to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot, what on earth else are they missing?
They didn't wait. That's why it shuts itself down.