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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

#441

Post by tigershark »

c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #347
kortex wrote: post #260

Earlier 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…

Wide temperature (-40C to +85C) DIMM and SSDs are available.. Companies like ATP and Apacer carry them. Intel's Xeon D series are meant for wide temps.

The starlink dish is rated to -30C so it’s not that bad on the freezing side.

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

#442

Post by postmeta »

disillusioned wrote: post #419
XorNot wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, fine. But the MCU still crashes on my (very yellowed screened) unit regularly, randomly. Right now, that doesn't cause me to crash: autopilot stays engaged. The car continues to function. There's even a low-level beep when autopilot is disengaged, even though all other audio fails. Blinkers still work. Etc. But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen r…

There are park and reverse buttons on the center console too. (not just the screen)

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

#443

Post by dkbrk »

shaklee3 wrote: post #376
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 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…

Existing phased-array antennas cost, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars.

Getting Starlink Dishy to around $2,000, and I understand it's closer to $1,000 by now, is an incredible engineering achievement. SpaceX didn't accomplish that by overengineering the shit out of it.

I do not doubt that now that this problem has cropped up SpaceX will address it. If they don't, if in a couple of years this is still a problem with the system in full operation, then criticism would be justified.

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

#444

Post by sundvor »

nine_k wrote: post #330
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Would it be worth blocking all those projects another 3 months just so that some guy in Arizona gets more Internet uptime on the hottest day of the year?" Umm, yes?

A few hundred thousand guys from less overheated areas might politely disagree.

Yeah and with the data they gather, they might be able to work out geographically appropriate versions. Eg add a smaller AIO water cooler to a hot climate area version, or some other hardening. Maybe it makes sense to apply to all versions? Can't know until you have some data. Sounds like a great and sensible beta program to me. Avoids premature optimisation, lets you see what actually goes wrong (where, and in what conditions) without a massive effort up front.

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

#445

Post by SiVal »

unfunco wrote: post #422
admax88q wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shouldn't even be considered "pushing the envelope" it's not that hot.

Not that hot? It's 122°, 134° is the highest ever recorded on Earth, it's pretty hot.

It has hit 122 deg in the shade in California both of the past two summers (not yet this year). That's in the shade. Put equipment on a dark roof in full sunshine and your dish becomes a solar cooker. Maybe they could sell it that way, and claim autonomous switching between two useful modes.

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

#446

Post by t0mas88 »

matheweis wrote: post #353
aaomidi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do aircraft engineers get a pass? > the Bombardier CRJ aircraft used on some shorter routes have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...

You may think this is a smart example, but you're mostly illustrating that you know nothing about aviation engineering.

The temperature limit for takeoff performance has nothing to do with the maximum temperature for electronics or other components. It's about air density decreasing which reduces the engine thrust as well as the maximum lift from the wings. So the warmer it gets the lower the maximum weight you can take off with and the higher the speed required before lift-off. At some point that's not safe anymore so the manufacturers only publish verified performance data up to a maximum temperature. You can't legally fly above that.

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

#447

Post by iam-TJ »

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…

Current dish (manufactured and supplied in April 2021):

  {
    "dishGetStatus": {
      "deviceInfo": {
        "id": "ut01000000-00000000-0000e586",
        "hardwareVersion": "rev1_pre_production",
        "softwareVersion": "db6b5d22-a642-43d6-bbec-97a816e3dbd6.uterm.release",
"rev1_pre_production" suggests the hardware will be subject to revision.

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

#448

Post by cheschire »

c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #342
eyegor wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering most of humanity lives within an hour's drive of the ocean, it's not a bad assumption.

I'm interested why you are being downvoted, as you bring up a good point that aligns with what kortex was saying in their post.

edit: ahh, now I see it's because you're factually incorrect. It's only 1/3rd of humans that live within 100km of oceanic coasts.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-o...

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

#449

Post by optimiz3 »

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.

You can bet the social media teams of Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of their ilk will be pushing this article through social networks hard.

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

#450

Post by varjag »

fy20 wrote: post #436
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

Even in Northern Europe, a car parked in direct sunlight can easily get to 70C (160F) inside. In winter the same car may be expected to start up straight away without issues at -30C (-22F).

While most modern car much of the time manage to start at -30C indeed, "expected" is overstating it. You really need one with an engine heater.
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