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Starlink dishes go into "thermal shutdown" once they hit 122° Fahrenheit:
A Starlink beta user in Arizona said he lost Internet service for over seven hours yesterday when the satellite dish overheated, demonstrating one of the drawbacks of SpaceX's broadband service. When the user's Internet service was disrupted, the Starlink app provided an error message saying, "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message said.
[...] The user, named Martin, posted a screenshot of the error message on Reddit. He contacted Starlink support, which told him, "Dishy will go into thermal shutdown at 122F and will restart when it reaches 104F." Martin decided to give the dish a little water so it could cool down. He pointed a sprinkler at Dishy, and once it cooled enough to turn back on, "I immediately heard YouTube resume playback," he wrote yesterday.
But the Internet restoration was short-lived, Martin told Ars in a chat today.
"The fix was temporary," he told us. "When I stopped the sprinkler, [the dish] heated back up and would cycle back on for a few minutes and go back down for thermal shutdown.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16 2021, @08:54AM (4 children)
My first thought, 122F what an awkward number to shut down. Seems like Starlink uses the Celcius scale.
Anyway, the big question is why? Never heard of this problem with TV satelite dishes and I guess the important electronics aren't build into the dish, right? And 50 degrees C... a cpu runs hotter than that.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Wednesday June 16 2021, @09:28AM (2 children)
Not Starlink but their suppliers. Something in there has a max.operating temperature of 50 degrees C. Commercial is usually 0 - 70, but since they claim 22 below zero Fahrenheit up to 104 Fahrenheit which is -30 to +40 they're using components rated on a different scale.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16 2021, @07:23PM (1 child)
I posit that a component with a 50°C max operating temperature is not a likely problem. The existence of a software shutdown like this makes no sense if the problem was just the designer picked an unsuitable part (or worse, the manufacturing team susbsituted a cheaper part). Such a scenario would more likely lead to the problem being ignored completely, or just swapping in a different part with an appropriate rating.
This shutdown smells like an "oh fuck" kind of 11th-hour quick fix. Some serious design problem was discovered late in testing and this was the only way they could get the finished product out the door in time. Probably either a thermal design issue (e.g., something running so absurdly hot normally that a slightly elevated ambient temperature leads to damage) or a regulatory compliance issue (e.g., the product failed EMI testing at elevated temperatures).
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 17 2021, @09:11AM
Sure, I was just looking at the temperature range and noticed it was the commercial 70 degrees shifted down a bit. I know that when we've tried to source devices it's been relatively easy to find stuff that will run at higher-than-commercial temps but once you get to lower-than-commercial temps it gets tricky. I know that some passives can do odd things at low temps but once you get to below about -30 it's really hard to find devices that are rated for that.
You're right though, this one seems like a patch for something...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday June 16 2021, @12:52PM
With a "normal" satellite dish the electronic components are in the LNB, a small light-colored device with lots of surface area that is isolated from the main area of the dish. Dishy mcflatface is a panel antenna with a bunch of electronic kit built into the main solar collecting area of the dish.
It's a requirements problem really; Designing the hardware in Redmond Washington they didn't think to include "Needs to work at temperatures high enough to scramble eggs/bake cookies."
Thermal issues for RF gear is not uncommon. I had to move a point-to-point access point out of an attic once for the same reason. It would go kaput in the heat of our Tennessee summers.