Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 50°C

[Guest willies leg]

I'll bet Elon's team figures it out, they're pretty smart there.

[Forbidden Wafer]

10 minutes ago, Spindel said:

I don't think they can, this is not like a satellite dish for TV that only receives signals. It is build for two way communication and you need to have a sender connected to the dish/antenna. 

 

I think he meant moving the processors inside and keeping only the antennas outside (which are not that susceptible to heat).

 

Certainly doable, as cellphone towers do exactly that. How much additional cables, power and shielding would be needed is a great question.

[Tech Enthusiast]

Now that seems like a major design flaw.

Hell, 50c surface temp is reached frequently in Germany, which is not exactly one of the hottest countries.

 

Kinda expecting A LOT of outages in the coming weeks. 

There is no way 50c surface temps are enough for something that is looking the sun in the eyes 24/7.

[suicidalfranco]

Why is he at home watching YouTube in such a perfect day?

Should be at the beach or mountain

[Fasterthannothing]

Simple solution it seems would be to just put the dish not on the ground like this dude had it. If the system can get some breeze high up it should be fine maybe a fan could be added for hotter climates.

[Totallycasual]

As someone who spends a lot of time in the Aussie outback, this is a disturbing turn of events. 

[sazrocks]

4 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

It's probably not the dish itself (the parabola) that overheats, it's the electronics at the focal point of the dish. Coating the dish with even more reflective material would only send more heat energy to the device, not less. 

It’s not a parabola, it’s actually flat. It’s a phased array antenna, not a normal dish.

 

I follow r/Starlink relatively closely, and the interesting thing is that out of the many users in the southwest experiencing similar temperatures (including myself), this is the only user to post about dishy actually shutting down, so potentially there is something wrong with this particular unit or the way it is installed.

[wanderingfool2]

6 hours ago, Spindel said:

This is seriously a big design flaw. 

Well I would say it depends.  If Starlink is anything like Tesla, they might be able to fix things in software first (I'm thinking, they might be able to push a firmware update that utilizes less power, so it dissipates the heat it generates before hitting that threshold).  They might also determine that it can actually survive without damage up to 60C (not saying it will, but maybe).

 

I am betting there will be a hardware update as well though, but I seriously will not be surprised if there is the software/firmware update that increases the acceptable range from 50 to like 60C.

[ravenshrike]

2 hours ago, sazrocks said:

It’s not a parabola, it’s actually flat. It’s a phased array antenna, not a normal dish.

 

I follow r/Starlink relatively closely, and the interesting thing is that out of the many users in the southwest experiencing similar temperatures (including myself), this is the only user to post about dishy actually shutting down, so potentially there is something wrong with this particular unit or the way it is installed.

Could be a poor installation area where air currents are mostly blocked or it could be something as simple as being near the aircon exchanger. 

[Loote]

4 hours ago, BabaGanuche said:

 

You are thinking junction temperature not ambient temperature. 50C ambient is on the upper end of normal electronics. The dish uses about 100 watts it needs to be able to passively dissipate most of the heat, the rest is the actual RF signal it transmits, in a 50 C environment.

I refuse to believe they base it on ambient temp. If it's the brains, you could move them inside of the house, if it's the transmitter, you could go to lower power operation maintaining connection with lower speeds, but mostly that's because the correlation between ambient temperature and the actual device temperature can be very different in varied air pressure, humidity and wind. sazrocks' comment suggests that something could've been wrong with that individual device. I want some more info about this.

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, SlidewaysZ said:

Simple solution it seems would be to just put the dish not on the ground like this dude had it. If the system can get some breeze high up it should be fine maybe a fan could be added for hotter climates.

50c is 122f. If it's that hot, it's because of direct sunlight exposure (unless it's in Death Valley, then you're kinda screwed).

 

I'm not sure what the signal attenuation drop would be if you placed another layer of material in front of it. But if possible, providing the sensitive antenna with enough shade via more durable material might be what's called for. Regardless, I'm sure the next product revision will have this problem solved; it's all about engineering.

But it does beg the question: Why didn't this pass extreme environmental testing? Typically that's a process that all outdoor product development goes through; or should at least.

[Taf the Ghost]

Anywhere from 0 to 40 Latitude in either Hemisphere is going to run into issues during the Summer. Looks like whatever mounting approach is going to require separate, isolated location for the processing or the transmitters. 

 

But, yeah, can already see the "Watercooling our internet connection!" LTT video.

[Taf the Ghost]

This is also the first generation of the device. They'll most likely change the instillation requirements and offer a more "rugged" version in the future.

[Eaglerino]

5 hours ago, Tech Enthusiast said:

Now that seems like a major design flaw.

Hell, 50c surface temp is reached frequently in Germany, which is not exactly one of the hottest countries.

 

Kinda expecting A LOT of outages in the coming weeks. 

There is no way 50c surface temps are enough for something that is looking the sun in the eyes 24/7.

Where the heck is it hitting 50C/122F in Germany on a regular season basis?

[BabaGanuche]

10 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Where the heck is it hitting 50C/122F in Germany on a regular season basis?

Nowhere. The record is 41.2 C.

 

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

[Zodiark1593]

8 hours ago, LWM723 said:

Even CPU's can handle in excess of 100C.

CPUs, yes. The supporting components such as capacitors and MOSFETs, not so much. 

[Spindel]

44 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Where the heck is it hitting 50C/122F in Germany on a regular season basis?

My guess on most sun heated surfaces, like a satellite dish 

[strajk-]

50 degrees?

That's not a lot, a lot of surfaces around the globe hit that when exposed all day to the sun, in Portugal this is even pretty normal, for good reasons during the summer nobody touches metallic surfaces and the streets feel like a gigantic grill...time for some nice engineering from their part to get that tolerance up.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, strajk- said:

50 degrees?

That's not a lot, a lot of surfaces around the globe hit that when exposed all day to the sun, in Portugal this is even pretty normal, for good reasons during the summer nobody touches metallic surfaces and the streets feel like a gigantic grill...time for some nice engineering from their part to get that tolerance up.

Doesn't the Concrete that some building with Mirror Finish sits on gets hot enough to fry a couple of eggs? This is in Chicago  I think.

[Forbidden Wafer]

1 minute ago, whm1974 said:

Doesn't the Concrete that some building with Mirror Finish sits on gets hot enough to fry a couple of eggs? This is in Chicago  I think.

Haha, there's an epic failure of a concave building that melted cars in London.

 

 

 

[whm1974]

43 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Haha, there's an epic failure of a concave building that melted cars in London.

 

 

 

I found it very amusing that a frying pan gotten hot enough to fry a few eggs in placed in it. And here I thought that was just a figure of speech.

[Centurius]

12 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

So... Make one rated from, say 32ºF (0ºC) to 140ºF (60ºC). Climates closer to the Equator dont need freeze protection, so make a "Dishy McHeatface"

Unfortunately it's not really a matter of shifting the temperature range up. The temperature range they indicate has very specific reasons based on the technology used. Phased arrays are incredibly amazing (for example, they are the primary reason the most recent forms of military RADAR have become so amazing), but they're also incredibly hot. In most use cases there is some really beefy active cooling going on to keep them from overheating, the kind that for some reason SpaceX couldn't use with their satellite dishes. Best case scenario it was a cost-saving measure, in that case they can make a (more expensive) version for hotter climates. Worst and more likely case scenario, the design is fundamentally unable to incorporate such cooling and they hae to go back to the drawing table.

[Centurius]

6 hours ago, BabaGanuche said:

Nowhere. The record is 41.2 C.

 

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

That's the normal masurement usually taken some distance from the surface. When a place hits 30 C it is far from unheard of surface materials often used in construction to approach 50 C. Just try walking in an older city with a lot of stone and marble construction on a hot day (London and Berlin are great examples). The temperature you feel is much warmer and if you put your hand on say the roof of a building (where this satellite dish would be) you can easily burn it if you hold on too long.

[cj09beira]

6 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

CPUs, yes. The supporting components such as capacitors and MOSFETs, not so much. 

mosfets are even stronger, most are designed to handle 100ºc no problem with shut downs at 125ºC, 150ºC internal temp

[Forbidden Wafer]

4 minutes ago, Centurius said:

The temperature you feel is much warmer and if you put your hand on say the roof of a building (where this satellite dish would be) you can easily burn it if you hold on too long.

Now imagine a roof with asphalt shingles (which are dark and I assume heat up quite a lot more than other materials such as clay).