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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

#461

Post by kortex »

willis936 wrote: post #458
kortex wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percent of customers don't experience thermal throttling in june? 90-99%? That's 1-2 nines. E: another comment mentions some cities in AZ are the hottest places in the world right now.

There are no nines in 60%.

The (back of the napkin) metric I'm using is: Integrate the total uptime of each Starlink customer, for every customer. Divide that by the integral of time billed for each customers.

So if you have 10,000 users billed for 1 month, and 10 of them get thermally throttled for half a day, every day that whole month, that's 99.95% reliability this month.

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

#462

Post by mannykannot »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #453
gugagore wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arcing involves ionizing air, right? I would have expected that the breakdown voltage of air increases with altitude, due to decreasing density of air.

Have you heard about vacuum tubes?

Yes, and when the cathode heater burns out, they stop conducting, as they depend on the thermionic emission of electrons (and the absense of gases).

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

#463

Post by josefx »

rini17 wrote: post #423
awesomeusername wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The dishes reportedly use around 100W. To safely dissipate such a power at higher temps, the design would need visible features (such as active cooling). Can't be done by just pushing software update.

Dial down throughput and reliability of the connection once enough people have bought into the original hype? Downgrading the performance seemed to be the popular solution for battery issues on phones not too long ago.

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

#464

Post by kortex »

fnord77 wrote: post #395
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…

I wouldn't want to roll the dice when it comes to aircraft

The hardware is an imaging system (see other comment). It does not impact flight avionics in any way, and is on an isolated power source. The flight engineers wouldn't let us roll the dice on anything mission critical. They did make us redo a bunch of wiring harnesses to use non-smoke-producing wires, for example.

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

#465

Post by kortex »

nr2x wrote: post #349
kortex wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company I worked for. We built an aerial multispectral imaging system for monitoring seals, polar bears, and other mammal populations. It's 3 high power rugged PCs, semi-affixed in a shock mount case in the tail of a Twin Otter. There's no hangars available at the airbases in e.g. Kotzebue, Deadhorse, Utqiagvik, so it sits on the tarmac and experiences some intense temperature swings. It's made it 2 winters and dozen…

Sounds like a fun job!

It was brilliant fun and also the most stressful period of my life, due to it being a bit far out of our core competencies at the time, delays in getting the camera hardware we had to interface with, limited staffing, and a comedy of other errors. Also the PM gets insanely airsick. As a result of all that, I got to go up to Kotzebue, AK with the PM to do the integration testing.

So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying for my resilience to motion sickness.

Stressful AF. So worth it.

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

#466

Post by bagacrap »

kortex wrote: post #289
path411 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but this isn't a 9. If it's really that low temp spec, it's gotta be kicking off most days for this and next month in AZ

What percent of customers don't experience thermal throttling in june? 90-99%? That's 1-2 nines. E: another comment mentions some cities in AZ are the hottest places in the world right now.

122 is not that hard to hit in direct sunlight. All of Texas, Florida and Arizona, plus many other areas, will hit this number on a regular basis in the summer, so this is less than one nine in terms of no of customers.

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

#467

Post by avipars »

judge2020 wrote: post #350
mmmBacon wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry HW engineer here and I strongly disagree. You don’t ship hardware like this. 122F is only 50C. Most components can handle 85C so shutting down at 50C means the thermal rise is >35C. This is simply poor design.

Directv dishes are only rated for 140F or 60C[0]. Pretty close, but it clearly makes a difference in Arizona. 0: https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-direct... .

10C difference can be life or death

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

#468

Post by avipars »

wumpus wrote: post #135

Several posters on r/Starlink report that they had seen their dishes at more than 122F, when this topic came up a few days ago. It's entirely possible that this story (and 122 hn comments so far) is about a dish with a loose heatsink, and not a product that always shuts down at 122F.

I am unsure, but it reminds me of the top gear episode where they intentionally destroyed the tesla for the script...

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

#469

Post by jessaustin »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #460
sundvor wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For fuck sakes people this is ambient temperature, it does not require beta testing, it requires someone to get off their ass and look at over a century of temperature data that organisations like nasa have been collecting. I see people here hate the idea of startups or engineers being responsible for any kind of reliable service even though lives depend on it, and as this "SV spirit" infiltrates more of our life eve…

prosperous

I think that's the idea...

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

#470

Post by mynewycombi »

rini17 wrote: post #423
awesomeusername wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The dishes reportedly use around 100W. To safely dissipate such a power at higher temps, the design would need visible features (such as active cooling). Can't be done by just pushing software update.

I guess users would have to strap on heatsinks and fans?
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