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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

#491

Post by foobiekr »

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.

This. I don’t understand why people give these companies credit for being able to solve problems when they straight up ignored industry experience.

It’s like.. hey guys, the rest of the world has been designing satellite dishes for 40 years that addressed these problems including very low cost stuff from the satellite TV era. Why didn’t SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?

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

#492

Post by foobiekr »

kortex wrote: post #260
jrockway wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that everyone on the team missed the fact that electronics get hot outdoors in the summer. Rather, they probably chose to launch a product that breaks when it gets hot, because it's an easy problem to fix later. Now that something is out in the field, they can debug their network, satellites, RF hardware, installation instructions, management applications, and figure out what kind of customers want to buy thi…

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…

No, it’s not. Ignoring perfectly predictable issues because you can’t even learn from recent history (millions of sat tv dishes in the nineties) or from industry (literally millions of cellular antennas) is not “smart.”

Also your example is a poor one. Engineering a systems solution for 0F is far easier than engineering for outdoors in the sun. Heat removal is a primary consideration and a 0F environment makes that far easier. In 0F your issue isn’t the cold, it’s the lack of humidity - again, something everyone who has more than two years in HW knows.

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

#493

Post by gspr »

V99 wrote: post #63
gspr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you know that heat waves are defined relative to the local climate. And recall that all but the southern part of Germany is north of the US-Canada border. AZ should be considered uninhabitable (in a sustainable sense) even outside of heat waves.

A reasonably modern air conditioner to cool your house in Phoenix a few months in the summer is more efficient than many of the common ways you'd heat a house from potentially well below freezing in the winter in many other places. And much of our power comes from solar (which is maximally available at the time cooling is maximally needed) and nuclear, while serious heating is often literally burning fossil fuels in…

I agree that your solar-powered cooling is a giant improvement. But the water situation still seems totally unsustainable.

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

#494

Post by dylan604 »

slipframe wrote: post #333
ineedasername wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mount it in a kiddie pool with a pump to reclaim the water. Starlink can sell it as a package deal: dish, pool, pump Extreme Weather package. Complete with puncture repair kit for the pool. Of course there's still evaporation, so you just station a half dozen condensing dehumidifiers around the pool to capture as much as you can in the immediate area and feed it back into the system. And there you go: For just a few…

Dehumidifiers are really just air conditioners, so at that point you might as well cut out the middle men and air condition the dish directly. An air conditioner will set you back a few hundred dollars, plus power costs.

Sorry, but the voice of my dad yelling, "I'm not paying to air condition the outdoors" haunts this comment!

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

#495

Post by digikata »

daniellarusso wrote: post #165
digikata wrote: post #121

I’ve worked on multiple projects where, at the early prototype stage, we limped along with off the shelf generic heatsinks, or even no heatsinks, for a phase or two because for some reason, it was long lead or high expense or low priority to fit a custom high performance heatsink. It sometimes seems like thermal work is as eschewed by electronic engineers as mechanical engineers often avoid HVAC.

I have always had a bizarre fascination with refrigeration engineering. It is amazing all the things this has enabled for humanity.

I always wished that the acoustic refrigeration tech ended up working out better with wider adoption.

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

#496

Post by runarberg »

extrapickles wrote: post #415
runarberg wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Elon Musk hater here: Starlink provides an excellent example of a deeper problem I see with new technology vs. traditional infrastructure. We know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all over the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on infrastructure. Elon Musk (and the likes) see an opportunity to disrupt this simple answer and make money selling a different unproven solution that has the potential…

After investing[0] billions per year in traditional communications companies, we still have people where the only way they can get service is by laying the fiber themselves. States have also been trying to invest in expanding fiber, but traditional companies have been just pocketing the money and blocking anyone else from improving things (eg: google fiber). Starlink seems to be a very cheap option in comparison, eve…

Other countries seem to be able to get fast internet connection with traditional infrastructure to small towns and communities. Why not America?

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

#497

Post by ficklepickle »

zamadatix wrote: post #305
duskwuff wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, fwiw, that's exactly what SpaceX did to make Dishy tolerant of low temperatures (and to help it clear snow/ice from the dish). There's just no equivalent solution for high temperatures.

I used to think it was just a matter of product cost to do active cooling... really the problem isn't the temperature it's the dew point! Which I guess could probably be solved with enough hardware, planning, and cost as well... but a ridiculous amount compared to adding an electric heater for the opposite problem. Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get…

Thermoelectric coolers can cool below ambient. You can get them for CPUs, I saw one on a Linus YouTube video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

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

#498

Post by zamadatix »

meimo wrote: post #311
zamadatix wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think it was just a matter of product cost to do active cooling... really the problem isn't the temperature it's the dew point! Which I guess could probably be solved with enough hardware, planning, and cost as well... but a ridiculous amount compared to adding an electric heater for the opposite problem. Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get…

a fridge

I mean electronic device, things in a fridge/freezer generally don't mind condensation or deposition.

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

#499

Post by duskwuff »

ficklepickle wrote: post #497
zamadatix wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think it was just a matter of product cost to do active cooling... really the problem isn't the temperature it's the dew point! Which I guess could probably be solved with enough hardware, planning, and cost as well... but a ridiculous amount compared to adding an electric heater for the opposite problem. Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get…

Thermoelectric coolers can cool below ambient. You can get them for CPUs, I saw one on a Linus YouTube video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

Sort of. Thermoelectric coolers transfer heat from a "cold side" to a "hot side", and generate a lot of additional heat in the process. They can be part of a cooling solution, but you still need active cooling (like a heat sink and fan) for the hot side -- they don't just "generate cold" in the kind of way that a resistive heater can generate heat.

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

#500

Post by solarkraft »

iam-TJ wrote: post #447
shaklee3 wrote: post #366

Earlier 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…

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.

But also that it hasn’t been iterated on yet, after 8 months.
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