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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

#471

Post by ganoushoreilly »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #408
stagger87 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As far as I can tell it's not advertised publicly. For instance it's not in the FAQ on the starlink website (although considerations about snow are). I was unable to find a PDF of the booklet that comes in the box though, so maybe it's in that.

I don’t recall a booklet in our box, just a cardboard setup overlay and a weather cover. It might have been in one of the the accessory boxes, I’ll look later today.

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

#473

Post by jessaustin »

tyingq wrote: post #192
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A satellite dish doesn't do super well in the shade :)

Line of sight to a satellite is only close to the sun for an hour or two a day, and only in certain locations on earth. It is entirely feasible to shade the rest of the sky.

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

#474

Post by BoxOfRain »

casi wrote: post #439
kortex wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these folks are used to internet going out because the wind is blowing too hard, or it's raining, or snowing, or a cow is stepping on the fiber link. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/how-cows-caused-s...

People are always surprised when I describe how bad the internet connection I have is here in the UK. 3meg down 0.2 up. If it rains or is too windy the connection dies. I’ve spoke to bt and openreach hundreds of times but it never gets any better. I’m the last house on the end of a copper line and there is no interest in fixing it. Four years ago the village was supposed to get fibre, recently “delayed” again. I rely…

Yeah, British internet can be fairly inconsistent. I'm in a rural-ish area and can get 100 megs down on a fibre-to-the-house connection, but when I lived in an actual town I would be lucky to get 2 megs down on a good day. I literally ended up doing everything over 4G back then because the fixed internet connection was just abysmally bad and Openreach never cared enough to fix it.

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

#475

Post by tyingq »

jessaustin wrote: post #473
tyingq wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A satellite dish doesn't do super well in the shade :)

Line of sight to a satellite is only close to the sun for an hour or two a day, and only in certain locations on earth. It is entirely feasible to shade the rest of the sky.

My guess is that most people follow the directions to place the satellite dish with an unobstructed view of the sky. Thus, most of them are in the sun, regardless of how they are pointed and oriented.

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

#476

Post by jessaustin »

cartoonworld wrote: post #151
adamcstephens wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I guess you hate Phoenix?

Before reading this thread I didn't...

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

#477

Post by shaklee3 »

_Microft wrote: post #421
shaklee3 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Do you know when they need to have started providing service there at the latest? They began providing service at higher latitude earlier because that is where the satellites "lump" due to their inclination, so that they needed fewer satellites in total. They are also required to cover Alaska and have now started launching Starlink satellites into (near-)polar orbits. If these are test sats or actually operational I…

I believe late next year is the first real rollout, and the rest are scattered over 2 years. This is the reason they changed the inclination and altitude several times.

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

#478

Post by shaklee3 »

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…

The reason I don't believe this is they are required to start providing service per the FCC by the end of this year. The antenna lead time is long enough to where they can't change the design now unless it was already in the pipeline.

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

#479

Post by shaklee3 »

dkbrk wrote: post #443
shaklee3 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

There is no evidence I've seen showing that it's less than $2000. Please send a link to the source.

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

#480

Post by shaklee3 »

shaklee3 wrote: post #369
babesh wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link is mostly a honeypot for Elon Musk haters. I wonder if they have bothered looking at the operating temperatures of other satellite Internet dishes? A simple search will net you heating and cooling devices for satellite dishes. If you face more extreme temperatures, you need only go buy a heating and cooling unit. http://www.dishcamo.com/dish_heater.htm

Why are you showing links to heaters? You ask if other manufacturers have this problem, then you provide links to the exact opposite problem which is freezing temperatures. The answer to your original question is no, other manufacturers do not shut down anywhere near this temperature.

Radomes cost over $10k at these frequencies, so that's not a solution.
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