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Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
- hulitu 5y ago122 F seems to be 50 °C. Are those things designed for space or for home office ?
- postalrat 5y agoNeither. They are designed to sit outdoors with a clear view of the sky (and the sun I guess).
- zdragnar 5y ago+100F in Sun isn't at all uncommon during a hot summer in the upper Midwest if the object is dark. Air temperatures of over 100 are a semi-annual occurrence, typically around August, so a dark object (such as a roof or blacktop) pushing 120 wouldn't be a surprise at all. Still not as bad as AZ, but it's not that much different. We aren't even close to a desert or space either- forests, plains, lakes and rivers abound.
- GavinMcG 5y agoIt was 102° F in St. Louis today. Not hard to imagine 20° hotter on some roofs.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago122+ F ambient on concrete.. it's going to be much hotter than that.
- pickle-wizard 5y agoBeing in direct sun in the South, I imagine that is pretty easy to hit. Guess there will be a market for air conditioned radomes.
- daguire 5y agoDITBA
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoI’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 should be able to cool a cabin down below 72F while driving through 120F weather. Too many vehicles fail this, and frankly it’s repulsive for something you buy for 5-6 figures.
- newsclues 5y agoIt’s not a safety issue like car regulation, engineering choices have costs. Just because it doesn’t work in your environment doesn’t mean that it’s not suitable elsewhere and the burden of spec changes for your climate may make the cost go up for people elsewhere who don’t have the same requirements
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- edoceo 5y agoWhy build a product for everyone you're marketing to when you can cheaply build a product that works for some but still sell to all. Caveat Emptor after all. Hit my OKRs for the quarter, I'm going to the pub.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoEh, every design choice is a compromise between multiple variables. The cost has to be reasonable for there to be someone to sell the product to.
- newsclues 5y agoBecause the cost would go up, and marketing becomes harder which makes it harder to get data and revenue to continue engineering.
- mrlonglong 5y agoFit them with fans to keep them cool. Simples.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoParting Shot: "To all beta testers using Starlink this summer, better come up with a dish heat management system or else face no connectivity. Not surprising, considering this is a company owned by Elon Musk."
- josefresco 5y agoA line like this (and Reddit sources) makes me question the authenticity of this story.
- rconti 5y agoI mean, it is Zero Hedge.
- quanticle 5y agoThe Ars Technica version of this story [1] has more detail. The tl;dr is that Starlink dishes have an upper limit of 50°C and a lower limit of -30°C. While these limits are fine for consumer electronics used indoors, they're obviously inappropriate for outdoor electronics. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...
- gpm 5y ago> they're obviously inappropriate They're unfortunately constraints, but for 95% of people they're workable constraints. If there are difficult problems with bumping these limits (I have no clue), it could just become part of the market definition.
- quanticle 5y agoOnly if you're counting people who live in San Francisco and other similarly temperate climates. I live in Minnesota. Last week, the high temperature, in the shade, was about 40°C. A device in the sun would easily see its temperature exceed 50°C. In the winter, overnight lows can go to -40°C. An outdoor device with thermal limits of -30°C to +50°C is not fit for purpose in many parts of the Midwest.
- spuz 5y agoThis sounds like the perfect opportunity for Linus from Linus Tech Tips to show us how to watercool a Starlink dish.
- endymi0n 5y ago…is it called streaming then?
- newacct583 5y agoPer the article, it's already been tested and works. Just throw a sprinkler on the thing. Clearly, though, the tolerances weren't chosen correctly when they designed the thing. 122F isn't actually that hot for a device designed to sit stationary in the sun all day.
- sleepybrett 5y agoAt least they made it white, dishtv's, and others I'm sure, antennas are black.
- dylan604 5y ago> Just throw a sprinkler on the thing. Yeah, that's a brilliant plan for a part of the world that is severely restricted on water usage and is routinely in drought conditions.
- adamcstephens 5y agoGiven the size of Phoenix, people don’t give a fuck about their resource use.
- dylan604 5y agoI read an article some time back, maybe a link from here, talking about how the up tick in population of AZ/NV were during an unusual wet period which people thought was acceptable and normal. Now, it seems the area is going back to its more natural dry period. Mother Nature's perception of time is very different than human's.
- api 5y agoSo apparently one of the downsides of Starlink is that the base station is an energy pig. Doesn't surprise me all that much in retrospect but I didn't think of it when I first heard about it.
- trixie_ 5y agoHow much energy does it use?
- slownews45 5y ago110W 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 end user terminals. I've not seen ones with the spaceX approach (simple end user install). Perhaps the professional installs get the energy use down to 10W or whatever is not considered "energy pig" usage. As a point of reference, tesla's cars hit energy draws of 900,000W when driving. Their semi is likely to use even more. So I think worth being careful about energy pig label.
- smachiz 5y agoNo wifi hotspot is using 110 watts. 110 watts is a fair amount of power - at $0.20/kWh you're going to add $16 to your power bill monthly. It's similar to leaving a desktop computer on 24/7.
- slownews45 5y agoMy Netgear R8500 was 50 watts easily I'd say. My friends gaming computer DEFINATELY uses more than 100W. Basic computer use for cryptomining seems to use a lot more as well. It just doesn't seem like 100W for what this thing does is a ton.
- bostonsre 5y agoThey should probably sell white painted versions for warmer climates.
- tpmx 5y agoThe enclosure is made of some kind of white plastic. But the consumer units also consume ~100W evenly spread out just below the flat plastic surface. So many (expensive) chips needed to do that phased array antenna thing. https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-terminal-cost-spacex-gwynne-shotwell-president-2021-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-terminal-cos... SpaceX signed an agreement a few years ago with Swiss manufacturer STMicroelectronics to build the terminals, a person with knowledge of the deal told Insider in December. They added that SpaceX may be paying $2.4 billion to produce 1 million Starlink terminals. At least it will melt any snow/ice during winter time in northern climates. Comment: ST is primarily French-Italian, with a HQ in Switzerland. I wouldn't call it Swiss.
- trixie_ 5y agoAll the comments on the article are really extremist. So I looked up Zerohedge and found it 'is a far-right libertarian financial blog' and 'is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis' .. so I guess that makes sense. Not sure why anyone would be bearish of a beta product that is only just scratching the surface of its potential.
- kemonocode 5y agoIt may be a libertarian rag, but the article is just about what it says on the title: thermal shutdown hitting Starlink users. In fact, I had tried to submit an article coming from Ars Technica [0] but I deleted it as I saw it gaining no traction and I noticed this one had a sizable amount of upvotes and comments already. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...
- vxNsr 5y agoAppears source was changed to yours
- j-pb 5y agoI have a starlink beta, and we're currenty experiencing a really bad hearwave here in germany ( I measured 35C in the shade ). Mine works like a charm regardless.
- marcinzm 5y agoThat's not a heatwave by US standards, that's a pretty common summer day for a decent chunk of the US. Arizona can get to around 50C.
- gspr 5y agoI 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.
- V99 5y agoA 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 your basement.
- bart_spoon 5y agoI actually believe that the opposite is true. It takes much more energy to cool off a home with AC than it does to heat a home in cold weather.
- marcinzm 5y agoNo it doesn't. An AC essentially transfers more heat energy out than electricity it consumes. Most heating generates exactly as much heat as energy consumed (electric heaters, burning fuels, etc.). Heat pumps are an exception but they don't work well before freezing temperatures.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoSort of funny that the solution for streaming is to literally turn on a stream of water. On a separate note, even if you don’t live in Arizona, a litmus test for good engineering is whether or not you see reviews of a product melting in Arizona. Yeah, melt. Literally. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US. If it doesn’t work here, it’s not mass market.
- ethanbond 5y agoA good litmus test for good city location is whether or not melting objects/burns from touching objects is a daily concern
- gspr 5y agoYeah, I agree: the bug here is humans building giant cities in the desert.
- mcguire 5y agoLike southern California?
- AJ007 5y agoA lot more than the southern part.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- threatofrain 5y agoIf you say south California it's difficult to know how much inland you mean, because as you travel inland you go from hot to Hot. You can measure a city in terms of how many days of productivity your family would lose if you didn't have AC or heat running full blast.
- jayd16 5y agoOur giant cities are on the coast.
- gonesilent 5y agoDidn't knock my unit off in 110° heat Red bluff California.
- rhacker 5y agoHello from 15 minutes to the south in Corning.
- iandanforth 5y agoYou'd think that after the fiasco of not using automotive grade parts at Tesla which forced them to run AC to keep them within operating range they would have put more thought into high temperature electronics.
- kemonocode 5y agoI wonder why such an aggressive thermal cutoff too, 50C ain't that hot even for consumer-grade electronics. Is it related to all that heat reducing SNR to unacceptable levels? If so, that frankly sounds like a pretty severe design shortcoming.
- toss1 5y agoYup, the basiv spec for this device intended to be used remotely should be summer in the Saudi desert, or at least Death Valley (in the same US state) - with solar heating also expected. It's nice that they at least check & shut down to protect the device, but this shouldn't have made it out of the prototypes, nevermind Alpha or Beta testing...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cgb223 5y agoWeird to see a ZeroHedge article a) on Hacker News and b) even talking about StarLink at all
- mariushn 5y agoHope the fix for this will be Elon tackling climate change :)
- digikata 5y agoI’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.
- daniellarusso 5y agoI have always had a bizarre fascination with refrigeration engineering. It is amazing all the things this has enabled for humanity.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoWell, I’ve heard of preserving food and transporting vaccines, but as an enthusiast have you got any exotic examples for me?
- sfifs 5y agoNot OP but you might find it interesting to hear the thoughts of one of the most successful nation builders in history on air conditioning :-) https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
- digikata 5y agoI always wished that the acoustic refrigeration tech ended up working out better with wider adoption.
- vondur 5y agoSound like the heat issues with the original X-box’s.
- smoldesu 5y agoI have a Starlink, but I also live in Michigan, so it probably won't get exposed to temps like that. Guess I dodged a bullet?
- wumpus 5y agoSeveral 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.
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoI also believe this was sitting on the ground on the tripod stand included in the box. I have ours roof mounted and noticed that the temperates were lower once mounted vs on the ground. That said our Farm isn't in AZ so it wasn't nearly as hot. I think you're probably right about it being an edge case heatsink issue, one that was amplified by Dishy's placement. Outside of that, Starlink has been great for us. Having a real connection rather than a 1 bar 4g connection has been life changing out at the farm.
- iamhamm 5y agoI have Starlink and I'm in Pahrump, NV. We hit 111F today and my dishy is in direct sunlight on the ground so it was easily over 120F. Hell, my direct sunlight thermometer showed over 130F! Didn't go into thermal shutdown, no disruptions in service, and I didn't have to water it either.
- mrandish 5y agoVery valuable comment. If this isn't all, or even most, of the beta units then it may indeed be a loose heat sink or variance in manufacturing tolerance. This can be far more easily (and cheaply) addressed than a population wide issue. It may also be the case that the thermal limit is currently set more conservatively than it needs to be. When every hardware unit is rare, costly and yet vital to gathering beta data, the choice to go extra conservative on thermal limits to prevent damage to scarce hardware deployed in the field seems logical.
- user3939382 5y agoIt's sad Art Bell isn't around to test it out, he loved radio technology I'm sure he would have gotten a kick out of it :(
- ineedasername 5y agoThis can't be a new problem, how do companies like Direct TV handle this? More robust equipment?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoReceive-only dishes are usually just a curved piece of metal with a fairly dumb LNB mounted on an arm. The Starlink "dish" isn't a traditional parabolic reflector, it is a phased array antenna with electronics under the surface.
- blhack 5y agoStarlink 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.
- new_realist 5y agoThis flaw was known to SpaceX before the beta began; SpaceX has publicly said the dishes are only certified to 104° Fahrenheit. Musk prefers to ship known broken products in the name of velocity, and out of a sociopathic contempt for the consumer. It’s happened to me more than once.
- stagger87 5y agoIs 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?
- tptacek 5y agoYes? If you advertise a flaw, it remains a flaw.
- throwaway69123 5y agoHard to call this a flaw no product ever invented isn’t without limitations
- falcolas 5y agoHowever, products are frequently created to not shut down in “average” summer temperatures. It’s a well known operating parameter throughout the US - temperatures break 105°F even up in Canada. It’s not even the hottest part of the summer yet. I can’t imagine this problem getting better.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt should work at an extension of military temperature ranges for global use indoors, outdoors, and in odd semi-indoor scenarios like the back of a hot truck: -75 to +125 C / -103 F to 257 F. Treating it as retail consumer electronics shit isn't rugged enough for real use.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoSpeaking of which, how could mobile phones be made to work in extremely hot temperatures for emergencies without shutting down?
- seventytwo 5y agoIt’s really just comes down to thermal mass vs. power dissipation. Either you have to increase the thermal mass, or limit the power. 99.99..% of use cases are for the phone to be in your pocket inside, so designing in a larger thermal mass, or limiting performance isn’t going to be a factor that drives design. However, since most phones are relative water resistant now, a good option is to use evaporative effects to cool them down. You could also dig a hole in the earth to find cooler temps and dissipate heat that way.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI think the earth approach is a good option, even if one has to dig a few feet down to find some cooler ground in the middle of nowhere.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoMostly just by using better components and beter internal cooling (=thicker design). You can find same chips (=same function) made for consumer electronics, automative, aeronautic and military, all with different temperature and humidity ranges. I'm not sure about mobile phone CPUs/SoCs, but automotive equipment is a lot more resilient to voltage spikes well above the normal 12-14V.
- 5y ago
- tidwall 5y agoWhen my family moved to Arizona in 1987 we brought along our Pontiac Firebird. My mom loved that car. But it melted in the summer heat. Literally the glue that adhered the the interior materials could not handle the heat and stuff just started falling down. Goop flowing down the walls and windows.
- cameldrv 5y agoI've seen a teardown of one of these things, and it's sealed well to keep out the weather, but that also makes it hard to put in a cooling fan.
- squarefoot 5y agoThe problem is not the outside temperature, but the small difference from the inside one preventing the circuitry inside the dish to cool down. Also the way it is engineered doesn't help: it draws about 100 Watts of power, but the entire circuitry is enclosed in a plastic container with no way to exchange heat with the outside, and the heating parts are kept in "contact" with the metal plate working as heatsink through thermal pads which seem just too thick to me to transfer enough heat. The metal plate should be helped to dissipate all that heat, but that would require flowing air, which is not an option in a closed box. According to a teardown video, there's no way to remove the metal plate without destroying the device, but one can still reach it and that would make possible for example thermal-gluing a metal pipe to it, then build a liquid cooling system by pumping the liquid through a better external heatsink with real fins. Teardown article with photos and video: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teardown-of-dishy-mcflatface-the-spacex-starlink-user-terminal/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
- sfblah 5y ago100 watts seems like a lot for a receiver. Any idea where all that energy is going? Signal amplification?
- eightysixfour 5y agoIt also has to send using a phased array as well.
- sfblah 5y agoOh right duh. Thanks.
- Black101 5y ago122F... lol.... I guess they forgot that we have a sun? https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/06/16/16/44302655-9692943-image-a-6_1623856961873.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/06/16/16/44302655-9692943-...
- boiledrope 5y agoThe sun is hot
- mr_toad 5y agoNot really, it’s surface temperature is about 5800K, which is just middling for a star. Surface temperatures of blue supergiants can reach 50,000K.
- kortex 5y agoHey, remember that time the entire power grid in Texas was crippled due to things going out of temperature range spec? Only in that case, it wasn't a beta product, it was critical infrastructure, that they were warned about and had ample opportunity to fix. Getting components rated outside of "normal operating conditions" is a PITA on a good day, and impossible otherwise. You straight up don't design for every possible condition for the beta. That's bad engineering and a waste of time and money. Pick the number of 9's you want, estimate the conditions, draw a line in the sand, and build the damn thing, knowing damn well X% of customers will have an issue. Revise, fix it, refine your product and process.
- path411 5y agoYeah 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
- kortex 5y agoWhat 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.
- willis936 5y agoThere are no nines in 60%.
- kortex 5y agoThe (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.
- bagacrap 5y ago
- roamerz 5y agoMaybe those that are exhibiting problems were sold to people that the engineers didn’t design for. Sales people don’t tend to care who they sell to $ometimes.
- myrandomcomment 5y agoAs 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.
- foysaluix 5y agoI like it.
- pmontra 5y agoI don't know anything about the engineering of those dishes but why do they need to put electronics in them and can't move it at the other end of the cable, inside the house?
- max_ 5y agoHow does a starlink internet connection perform in a light storm? The dish looks a bit delicate.
- sgaduuw 5y agoThey should ask Ubiquiti how to handle this. Their Unifi range of products don't start doing anything unless they're at least at 65°C
- einarfd 5y agoI've been looking at the other comments on this article, and there is a couple of points that I haven't seen address by others that I think are pertinent. 1) What was it that Starlink wanted to beta test with customers? It might very well be that they shipped hardware with know environmental weaknesses, so not to hold up other parts of the project. While taking a hit on the reliability in edge cases. 2) We know that there are some dishes out there that have heat issues, but we don't know how many dish hardware iterations they have done. The failing dishes could very well be early prototypes that have know issues. Which are fixed in later revisions. Generally speaking I don't see these reports as worrying. I've just come of 10+ years of working on SW on (indoor), embedded hardware. Having alpha and beta hardware with issues are common, you need some hardware to run your test and SW development on. Even if it is fundamentally flawed and you have to throw it away because of those weakness later. For those that only have experience of building software. What you are seeing here, is a view into the sausage factory, and just because it feels messy and doesn't line up with your expectations. Don't mean that they are doing it wrong.
- anotheryou 5y agoI'd try attaching a tiny tarp to the dish itself
- ficklepickle 5y ago-